Since Cézanne

SINCE CEZANNE

(Photo: E. D

CEZANNE

SINCE CEZANNE

BY

CLIVE BELL

LONDON

CHATTO AND WINDUS
1922

Printed in England at the Cloister Press, Heaton Mersey, nr. Manchester

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Most of these Essays appeared in THE NEW RE-
PUBLIC and THE ATHENAEUM: some, however,
are reprinted from T H E BURLINGTON MAGAZINE,

THE NEW STATESMAN, and ART AND DECORA-
TION. I take this opportunity of thanking the
editors of all.

C. B.

CONTENTS

I. Since Cezanne Page i'

II. The Artistic Problem 40

III. The Douanier Rousseau ' 49

(IV. Cezanne 57

^V. Renoir 66

VI. Tradition and Movements 74

VII. Matisse and Picasso 83

VIII. The Place of Art in Art Criticism 91

IX. Bonnard 98

X. Duncan Grant 105

XI. Negro Sculpture 113

XII. Order and Authority (i and 2) 122

XIII. Marquet 139

XIV. Standards 145
XV. Criticism: i. First thoughts 154

2. Second thoughts 162

3. Last thoughts 169
XVI. Othon Friesz 180

XVII. Wilcoxism 187

XVIII. Art and Politics 194

XIX. The Authority of M. Derain 205

XX. " Plus de Jazz " 213

ILLUSTRATIONS

CEZ4NNE Frontispiece

SEUR4T To face page i

MATISSE 57

PIC4SSO 83

BONN4RD 98

DUNCAN GRJNT 105

OTHON FRIESZ 180

DER4IN 205

SEURAT

(I'hoto: E. Dniet)

SINCE CEZANNE

With anyone who concludes that this pre-
liminary essay is merely to justify the rather
appetizing title of my book I shall be at
no pains to quarrel. If privately I think it
does more, publicly I shall not avow it.
Historically and critically, I admit, the thing
is as slight as a sketch contained in five-
and-thirty pages must be, and certainly it
adds nothing to what I have said, in the
essays to which it stands preface, on aesthetic
theory. 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 book, giving, in the process, a rough
sketch of the period with certain aspects of
which I am to deal. That the shape needs
justification is attributable to the fact that
though all, or nearly all, the component articles
were written with a view to making one volume,
I was conscious, while I wrote them, of dealing
with two subjects. Sometimes I was discussing
current ideas, and questions arising out of a
theory of art ; at others I was trying to give
some account of the leading painters of the
contemporary movement. Sometimes I was
writing of Theory, sometimes of Practice.
By means of this preface I hope to show why,
at the moment, these two, far from being
distinct, are inseparable.

To understand thoroughly the contemporary

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movement — that movement in every turn and
twist of which the influence of Cezanne is
traceable — the movement which may be said
to have come into existence contemporaneously
almost with the century, and still holds the
field — it is necessary to know something of
the aesthetic theories which agitated it. One
of the many unpremeditated effects of Ce'zanne's
life and work was to set artists thinking, and
even arguing. His practice challenged so
sharply all current notions of what painting
should be that a new generation, taking him
for master, found itself often, much to its
dismay, obliged to ask and answer such ques-
tions as " What am I doing ? " " Why am 1 1
doing it ? " Now such questions lead inevitably
to an immense query — " What is Art ? "
The painters began talking, and from words
sprang deeds. Thus it comes about that in
the sixteen or seventeen years which have
elapsed since the influence of Cezanne became j
paramount theory has played a part which no
critic or historian can overlook. It is because
to-day that part appears to be dwindling, be-i
cause the influence of theory is growing less,
that the moment is perhaps not inopportune
for a little book such as this is meant to be. It j
comes, if I am right, just when the movement j
is passing out of its first into the second phase. !
During this first phase theory has been much
to the fore. But it has been theory, you must \

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remember, working on a generation of direct
and intensely personal artists. In so curious
an alliance you will expect to find as much
stress as harmony; also, you must remember,
its headquarters were at Paris where flourishes
the strongest and most vital tradition of paint-
ing extant. In this great tradition some of the
more personal artists, struggling against the
intolerable exactions of doctrine, have found
powerful support ; indeed, only with its aid
have they succeeded at last in securing their
positions as masters who, though not disdaining
to pay homage for what they hold from the
new theories, are as independent as feudal
princes. But the more I consider the period
the more this strange and restless alliance
of doctrine with temperament appears to be of
its essence ; wherefore, I shall not hesitate to
make of it a light wherewith to take a hasty
look about me. Here are two labels ready to
hand — " temperamental " and " doctrinaire."
I am under no illusion as to the inadequacy
and fallibility of both ; neither shall I imagine
that, once applied, they are bound to stick. On
the contrary, you will see, in a later chapter,
how, having dubbed Matisse "temperamental"
and Picasso "theorist," I come, on examination,
to find in the art of Matisse so much science
and in that of Picasso such extraordinary sensi-
bility that in the end I am much inclined to
pull off the labels and change them about. But
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though, for purposes of criticism coarse and
sometimes treacherous, this pair of opposites —
which are really quite compatible — may prove
two useful hacks. As such I accept them;
and by them borne along I now propose to
make a short tour of inspection, one object of
which will be to indicate broadly the lie of the
land, 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
book.

I said, and I suppose no one will deny it, that
Paris was the centre of the movement: from
Paris, therefore, I set out. There the movement
originated, there it thrives and develops, and
there it can best be seen and understood. Ever
since the end of the seventeenth century France
has taken the lead in the visual arts, and ever
since the early part of the nineteenth Paris
has been the artistic capital of Europe. Thither
painters of all foreign nations have looked ;
there many have worked, and many more have
made a point of showing their works. Any-
one, therefore, who makes a habit of visiting
Paris, seeing the big exhibitions, and frequent-
ing dealers and studios, can get a pretty com-
plete idea of what is going on in Europe.
There he will find Picasso — the animator * of

* For this word, which I think very happily suggests
Picasso's r&le in contemporary painting, I am indebted to
my friend M. Andre Salmon.

SINCE CEZANNE

the movement — and some of the best of his
compatriots, Juan Gris and Marie Blanchard
for instance, to say nothing of such fashionable
figures as MM. Zuloaga et Sert. There he
will find better Dutchmen than Van Dongen,
and an active colony of Scandinavians the
most interesting of whom is probably Per
Krohg. The career of Krohg, by the way, is
worth considering for a moment and watching
for the future. Finely gifted in many ways, he
started work under three crippling disabilities
— a literary imagination, natural facility, and
inherited science. The results were at first
precisely what might have been expected.
Now, however, he is getting the upper hand
of his unlucky equipment ; and his genuine
talent and personal taste, beginning to assert
themselves, have made it impossible for criti-
cism any longer to treat him merely as an
amiable member of a respectable group.
What is true of Spain and Scandinavia is even
truer of Poland and what remains of Russia.
Goncharova and Larionoff — the former a typi-
cally temperamental artist, the latter an ex-
travagantly doctrinaire one — Soudeikine, Gri-
gorieff, Zadkine live permanently in Paris ;
while Kisling, whom I take to be the best of
the Poles, has become so completely identified
with the country in which he lives, and for
which he fought, that he is often taken by
English critics for a Frenchman. Survage
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(with his eccentric but sure sense of colour),
Soutine (with his delicious paint), and Mar-
coussis (a cubist of great merit) each, in his own
way, working in Paris, adds to the artistic reputa-
tion of his native country. In the rue La Boetie
you can see the work of painters and sculptors
from every country in Europe almost, and from
a good many in Africa. The Italian Futurists
have often made exhibitions there. While the
work of Severini — their most creditable repre-
sentative— is always to be found chex L6once
Rosenberg, hard by in the rue de la Baume.

However, most of the Futurists have retired
to their own country, where we will leave them.
On the other hand, the most gifted Italian
painter who has appeared this century, Modi-
gliani, was bred on the Boulevard Montpar-
nasse. In the movement he occupies an
intermediate position, being neither of the
pioneers nor yet of the post-war generation.
He was not much heard of before the war,*
and he died less than a year after peace was
signed. In my mind, therefore, his name is
associated with the war — then, at any rate,
was the hour of his glory ; he dominated the
cosmopolitan groups of his quarter at a time
when most of the French painters, masters and
disciples, were in the trenches. Modigliani
owed something to Ce*zanne and a great deal
to Picasso : he was no doctrinaire : towards

* He was at work, however, by 1906 — perhaps earlier.

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the end he became the slave of a formula of his
own devising — but that is another matter.
Modigliani had an intense but narrow sensi-
bility, his music is all on one string : he had a
characteristically Italian gift for drawing beauti-
fully with ease : and I think he had not much
else. I feel sure that those who would place
him amongst the masters of the movement —
Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Bonnard, and Friesz
— mistake ; for, with all his charm and origin-
ality, he was too thoughtless and superficial to
achieve greatly. He invented something which
he went on repeating ; and he could always
fascinate simply by his way of handling a
brush or a pencil. His pictures, delightful
and surprising at first sight, are apt to grow
stale and, in the end, some of them, unbear-
ably thin. A minor artist, surely.

Though Paris is unquestionably the centre
of the movement, 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 America. Germany has not
yet recommenced sending her art in quantities
that make judgement possible, while it is pretty
clear that the American art which reaches
Europe is by no means the best that America
can do. From both come magazines with
photographs which excite our curiosity, but
on such evidence it would be mere impertinence
to form an opinion. Of contemporary art in
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Germany and America I shall say nothing.
And what shall I say of the home-grown
article ? Having taken Paris for my point of
view, I am excused from saying much. Not
much of English art is seen from Paris. We
have but one living painter whose work is at all
well known to the serious amateurs of that
city, and he is Sickert.* The name, however,
of Augustus John is often pronounced, ill —
for they will call him Augustin — and that of
Steer is occasionally murmured. Through the
salon cTautomne Roger Fry is becoming known ;
and there is a good deal of curiosity about the
work of Duncan Grant, and some about that
of Mark Gertler and Vanessa Bell. Now, of
these, Sickert and Steer are essentially, and in
no bad sense, provincial masters. They are
belated impressiomsts of considerable merit
working in a ^tnoroughly fresh and personal
way on the problems of a bygone age. In
the remoter parts of Europe as late as the
beginning of the seventeenth century were to
be found genuine and interesting artists work-
ing in the Gothic tradition : the existence of
Sickert and Steer made us realize how far from

* The Irish painter O'Conor, and the Canadian Morrice,
are both known and respected in Paris; but because they
have lived their lives there and known none but French in-
fluences they are rarely thought of as British. In a less
degree the same might be said of that admirable painter
George Barne.

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the centre is London still. On the Continent
such conservatism would almost certainly be
the outcome of stupidity or prejudice ; but
both Sickert and Steer have still something of
their own to say about the world seen through
an impressionist temperament. The prodi-
gious reputation enjoyed by Augustus John
is another sign of our isolation. His splendid
talent when, as a young man, he took it near
enough the central warmth to make it expand
(besides the influence of Puvis, remember, it
underwent that of Picasso) began to bear
flowers of delicious promise. Had he kept it
there John might never have tasted the sweets
of insular renown : he would have had his
place in the history of painting, however.
The French know enough of Vorticism to
know that it is a provincial and utterly in-
significant contrivance which has . borrowed
what it could from Cubism and Futurism
and added nothing to either. They like to
fancy that the English tradition is that of
Gainsborough and Constable, quite failing to
realize what havoc has been made of this ad-
mirable plastic tradition by that puerile gospel
of literary pretentiousness called Pre-Raphael-
ism. Towards these mournful quags and
quicksands, with their dead-sea flora of anec-
dote and allegory, the best part of the little
talent we produce seems irresistibly to be
drawn : by these at last it is sucked down.
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That, at any rate, is the way that most of those
English artists who ten or a dozen years ago
gave such good promise have gone. Let us
hope better of the new generation — recent
exhibitions afford some excuse — a generation
which, if reactionarily inclined, can always take
Steer for a model, or, if disposed to keep abreast
of the times and share in the heritage of Cezanne
as well as that of Constable, can draw courage
from the fact that there is, after all, one English
painter — Duncan Grant — who takes honour-
able rank beside the best of his contemporaries.
It is fifteen years since Cezanne died, and
only now is it becoming possible to criticize
him. That shows how overwhelming his
influence was. The fact that at last his ad-
mirers and disciples, no longer under any
spell or distorting sense of loyalty, recognize
that there are in painting plenty of things
worth doing which he never did is all to the
good. It is now possible to criticize him
seriously ; and when all his insufficiencies have
been fairly shown he remains one of the very
greatest painters that ever lived. The serious
criticism of Cezanne is a landmark in the his-
tory of the movement, and still something of a
novelty ; for, naturally, I reckon the vulgar
vituperation with which his work was greeted,
and the faint praise with which it was subse-
quently damned, as no criticism at all. The
hacks and pedagogues and middle-class meta-
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physicians who abused him, and only when it
dawned on them that they were making them-
selves silly, in the eyes of their own flock even,
took to patronizing, are forgot. They babble
in the Burlington Fine Arts Club — where no-
body marks them — and have their reward in
professorships and the direction of public
galleries. The criticism that matters, of which
we are beginning to hear something, comes
mostly from painters, his ardent admirers, who
realize that Cezanne attempted things which
he failed to achieve and deliberately shunned
others worth achieving. Also, they realize
that there is always a danger of one good
custom corrupting the world.

Cezanne is the full-stop between impres-
sionism and the contemporary movement. Of
course there is really no such thing as a full-
stop in art any more than there is in nature.
Movement grows out of movement, and every
artist is attached to the past by a thousand
binders springing from a thousand places in
the great stem of tradition. But it is true that
there is hardly one modern artist of importance
to whom Cezanne is not father or grandfather,
and that no other influence is comparable with
his. To be sure there is Seurat, of whom we
shall hear more in the next ten years. Al-
though he died as long ago as 1891 his im-
portance has not yet been fully realized, his
discoveries have not been fully exploited, not
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yet has his extraordinary genius received ade-
quate recognition. Seurat may be the Gior-
gione of the movement. Working in isolation
and dying young, he is known to us only by a
few pictures which reveal unmistakeable and
mysterious genius ; but I should not be sur-
prised if from the next generation he were to
receive honours equal almost to those paid
C6zanne.

The brave douanier was hardly master enough
to have great and enduring influence ; never-
theless, the sincerity of his vision and direct-
ness of his method reinforced and even added
to one part of the lesson taught by Cezanne :
also, it was he who — by his pictures, not by
doctrine of course — sent the pick of the young
generation to look at the primitives. Such as
it was, his influence was a genuinely plastic one,
which is more, I think, than can be said for
that of Gauguin or of Van Gogh. The former
seemed wildly exciting for a moment, partly
because he flattened out his forms, designed
in two dimensions, and painted without chiaros-
curo in pure colours, but even more because
he had very much the air of a rebel. " II nous
faut les barbares," said Andre* Gide ; " il
nous faut les barbares," said we all. Well,
here was someone who had gone to live with
them, and sent home thrilling, and often very
beautiful, pictures which could, if one chose,
be taken as challenges to European civilization.
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To a considerable extent the influence of
Gauguin was literary, and therefore in the long
run negligible. It is a mistake on that ac-
count to suppose — as many seem inclined to
do — that Gauguin was not a fine painter.

Van Gogh was a fine painter, too ; but his
influence, like that of Gauguin, has proved
nugatory — a fact which detracts nothing from
the merit of his work. He was fitted by his
admirers into current social and political ten-
dencies, and coupled with Charles-Louis
Philippe as an apostle of sentimental anarchy.
Sentimental portraits of washerwomen and
artisans were compared with Marie Donadieu
and Bubu de Montparnasse ; and by indis-
creet enthusiasm the artist was degraded to
the level of a preacher. Nor was this degrada-
tion inexcusable : Van Gogh was a preacher,
and too often his delicious and sensitive works
of art are smeared over, to their detriment,
with tendencious propaganda. At his best,
however, he is a very great impressionist — a
neo-impressionist, or expressionist if you like —
but I should say an impressionist much in-
fluenced and much to the good, as was Gauguin,
by acquaintance with Cezanne in his last and
most instructive phase. Indeed, it is clear that
Gauguin and Van Gogh would not have come
near achieving what they did achieve — achieved,
mind you, as genuine painters — had they not
been amongst the first to realize and make
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use of that bewildering revelation which is
art of Cezanne.

Of that art I am not here to speak ; I
concerned only with its influence. Taking th<
thing at its roughest and simplest, one may say
that the influence of Cezanne during the last
* seventeen years has manifested itself most
obviously in two characteristics — Directness
and what is called Distortion. Ce'zanne was
direct because he set himself a task which ad-
mitted of no adscititious flourishes — the crea-
tion of form which should be entirely self-
supporting and intrinsically significant, la -pos-
session de la forme as his descendants call it now.
To this great end all means were good : all that
was not a means to this end was superfluous.
To achieve it he was prepared to play the
oddest tricks with natural forms — to distort.
All great artists have distorted ; Ce'zanne was
peculiar only in doing so more consciously
and thoroughly than most. What is important
in his art is, of course, the beauty of his con-
ceptions and his power in pursuit : indifference
to verisimilitude is but the outward and visible
sign of this inward and spiritual grace. For
some, however, though not for most of his
followers his distortion had an importance of
its own.

To the young painters of 1904, or there-
abouts, Ce'zanne came as the liberator : he
it was who had freed painting from a mass of
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conventions which, useful once, had grown
old and stiff and were now no more than so
many impediments to expression. To most
of them his chief importance — as an influence,
of course — was that he had removed all un-
necessary barriers between what they felt and
its realization in form. It was his directness
that was thrilling. But to an important
minority the distortions and simplifications —
the reduction of natural forms to spheres,
cylinders, cones, etc. — which Cezanne had
used as means were held to be in themselves
of consequence because capable of fruitful
development. From them it was found possi-
ble to deduce a theory of art — a complete
aesthetic even. Put on a fresh track by
Cezanne's practice, a group of gifted and
thoughtful painters began to speculate on the
nature of form and its appeal to the aesthetic
sense, and not to speculate only, but to material-
ize their speculations. The greatest of them,
Picasso, invented Cubism. If I call these
artists who forged themselves a theory of form
and used it as a means of expression Doc-
trinaires it is because to me that name bears
no disparaging implication and seems to in-
dicate well enough what I take to be their one
common characteristic : if I call those who,
without giving outward sign (they may well
have had their private speculations and systems)
of an abstract theory, appeared to use distor-

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tion when, where, and as their immediate
sensibility dictated, Fauves, that is because the
word has passed into three languages, is ad-
mirably colourless — for all its signifying a'
colour — and implies the existence of a group
without specifying a peculiarity. Into Doc-
trinaires— Theorists if you like the word
better — and Fauves the first generation of]
Cezanne's descendants could, I feel sure, be)
divided ; whether such a division would serve
any useful purpose is another matter. What I
am sure of is that to have two such labels, to be
applied when occasion requires and cancelled
without much compunction, will excellently
serve mine, which may, or may not, be useful.
I would not insist too strongly on the divi-i
sion ; certainly at first it was not felt to bej
sharp. Plenty of Fauves did their whack of
theorizing, while some of the theorists arej
amongst the most sensitive and personal on
the age. What I do insist on — because it ex-
plains and excuses the character of my book —
is that in this age theory has played so promi-
nent a part, hardly one artist of importance
quite escaping its influence, that no critic who
proposes to give some account of painting
since Cezanne can be expected to overlook it :
some, to be sure, may be thought to have
stared indecently. The division between Fauves
and Theorists, I was saying, in the beginning
was not sharp ; nevertheless, because it was
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real, already in the first generation of Cezanne's
descendants the seeds of two schools were
sown. Already by 1910 two tendencies are
visibly distinct ; but up to 1914, though there
.s divergence, there is, I think, no antipathy
Detween them-— of antipathies between in-
dividuals I say nothing. Solidarity was im-
posed on the young generation by the virulent
and not over scrupulous hostility of the old ;
it was funion sacree in face of the enemy.
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 victory, 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 in-
evitable dislike of Doctrinaires.

Taken as a whole, the first fourteen years of
the century, which my malicious friend Jean
Cocteau sometimes calls Vtyoque heroique^ pos-
sessed most of the virtues and vices that such
an epoch should possess. It was rich in fine
artists ; and these artists were finely prolific.
It was experimental, and passionate in its ex-
periments. It was admirably disinterested.
Partly from the pressure of opposition, partly
because the family characteristics of the C£zan-
nides are conspicuous, it acquired a rather
deceptive air of homogeneity. It was inclined
to accept recruits without scrutinizing over
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closely their credentials, though it is to be
remembered that it kept its critical faculty
sufficiently sharp to reject the Futurists while
welcoming the Cubists. I cannot deny, how-
ever, that in that moment of enthusiasm and
loyalty we were rather disposed to find extra-
ordinary merits in commonplace painters. We
knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent
disciple of Cezanne was just as worthless as a
feeble and incompetent disciple of anyone else
— but, then, was our particular postulant so
feeble after all ? Also, we were fond of argu-
ing that the liberating influence of Cezanne
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 ever. I doubt we exaggerated. We
were much too kind, I fancy, to a number of
perfectly commonplace young people, and said
a number of foolish things about them. What
was worse, we were unjust to the past. That
was inevitable. The intemperate ferocity of
the opposition drove us into Protestantism,
and Protestantism is unjust always. It made
us narrow, unwilling to give credit to outsiders!
of merit, and grossly indulgent to insiders of
little or none. Certainly we appreciated the;
Orientals, the Primitives, and savage art asf
they had never been appreciated before ;
but we underrated the art of the Renaissance
and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Also, because we set great store by our theories
and sought their implications everywhere, we
claimed kinship with a literary movement with
which, in fact, we had nothing in common.
Charles-Louis Philippe and the Unanimistes
should never have been compared with the
descendants of Cezanne. Happily, when it
came to dragging in Tolstoyism, and Dostoiev-
skyism even, and making of the movement
something moral and political almost, the con-
nection was seen to be ridiculous and was duly
cut.

The protagonists of the heroic epoch (1904—
1914 shall we say?) were Matisse and Picasso.
In modern European painting Picasso remains
the paramount influence ; of modern French,
however, Derain is the chief; while Matisse,
who may 3till be the best painter alive, has
hardly any influence at all. In these early days
Derain, considerably younger than Matisse
and less precocious than Picasso, was less
conspicuous than either ; yet he always held
a peculiar and eminent position, with an in-
tellect apt for theoretical conundrums and
sensibility to match that of any Fauve and his
personal genius brooding over both. About
the best known of Matisse's companions — for
they were in no sense his disciples — were, I
should say, Friesz, Vlaminck, Laprade, Cha-
baud, Marquet, Manguin, Puy, Delaunay,
Rouault, Girieud, Flandrin. I think I am
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justified in describing all these, with the ex-
ception, perhaps, of Girieud and Flandrin, as
Fauves ; assuredly I have heard them all so
described. In very early days Maurice Denis
was by some reckoned a chief, the equal almost
of Matisse ; but through sloppy sentiment he
fell into mere futility, and by now has quite
dropped out. Friesz, on the other hand, has
gone ahead, and is to-day one of the half-dozen
leaders : I shall have a good deal to say about
him in a later part of this book. Vlaminck
a few years ago had the misfortune to learn a
recipe for making attractive and sparkling
pictures ; he is now, I understand, in retire-
ment trying to unlearn it. Rouault is a very
interesting artist of whom we see little ; 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
painting. Marquet, with gifts equal to almost
anything, is content, it seems, to remain a
brilliant but superficial impressionist. Puy
is a thoroughly sound artist, and so in a smaller
way is Manguin. What has become of
Chabaud, who was a bit too clever, and a little
vulgar even ? And what of Delaunay ? And
of Flandrin — what has become of him ? Some-
thing sufficiently interesting, at any rate, to
give pause even to a critic in a hurry. His
name must not go by unmarked. Flandrin
was amongst the first to rebel against Im-

20

SINCE CEZANNE

pressionism — against that impressionism, I
mean, which remained implicit in post-impres-
sionism. Resolutely he set his face against
the prevailing habit of expressing an aspect of
things, and tried hard to make a picture. So
far he has succeeded imperfectly: but he is
still trying.

Of one artist who is certainly no Doctrinaire,
nor yet, I think, a Fauve, but who has been in-
fluenced by Cezanne, I shall here do myself
the honour of pronouncing the name. 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 Epstein, Archipenko and Bourdelle. These
have their merits ; but Maillol is a great artist.
He works in the classical tradition, modified by
Cezanne, thanks largely to whom, I imagine,
he has freed himself from the impressionism —
the tiresome agitation and emphasis — of Rodin.
He has founded no school ; but one pupil of
his, Gimon — a very young sculptor — deserves
watching. From the doctrine a small but
interesting school of sculpture has come :
Laurens, an artist of sensibility and some
power, and Lipsitz are its most admired repre-
sentatives. At home we have Epstein and
Dobson ; both have been through the stern
school of abstract construction, and Epstein
has emerged the most brilliant pasticheur alive.
21

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Brancuzi (a Bohemian) is, I should say, by
temperament more Fauve than Doctrinaire.
Older than most of Cezanne's descendants, he
has nevertheless been profoundly influenced
by the master ; but the delicacy of his touch,
which gives sometimes to his modelling almost
the quality of Wei sculpture, he learnt from
no one — such things not being taught. Gau-
dier Brzcska, a young French sculptor of con-
siderable promise, was killed in the early
months of the war. He had been living in
England, where his work, probably on account
of its manifest superiority to most of what was
seen near it, gained an exaggerated reputation.
The promise was indisputable ; but, after see-
ing the Leicester Gallery exhibition, I came
to the conclusion that there was not much else.
Indeed, his drawings often betrayed so super-
ficial a facility, such a turn for calligraphic
dexterities, that one began to wonder whether
even in expecting much one had not been over
sanguine. The extravagant reputation enjoyed
by Gaudier in this country will perhaps cross
the mind of anyone who happens to read my
essay on Wilcoxism : native, or even resident,
geese look uncommonly like swans on home
waters : to see them as they are you should
see them abroad.

Bonnard and Vuillard, unlike Aristide Mail-
lol, though being sensitive and intelligent
artists who make the most of whatever serves

22

SINCE CEZANNE

their turn they have taken what they wanted
from the atmosphere in which they work,
are hardly to be counted of Cezanne's descen-
dants. Rather are they children of the great
impressionists who, unlike the majority of their
surviving brothers and sisters, instead of swal-
lowing the impressionist doctrine whole, just
as official painters do the academic, have
modified it charmingly to suit their peculiar
temperaments. Not having swallowed the
poker, they have none of those stiff and static
habits which characterize the later generations
of their family. They are free and various ;
and Bonnard is one of the greatest painters
alive. Mistakenly, he is supposed to have in-
fluenced Duncan Grant ; but Duncan Grant,
at the time when he was painting pictures which
appear to have certain affinities with those of
Bonnard, was wholly unacquainted with the
work of that master. On the other hand, it
does seem possible that Vuillard has influenced
another English painter, Miss Ethel Sands :
only, in making attributions of influence one
cannot be too careful. About direct affiliations
especially, as this case shows, one should never
be positive. It is as probable that Miss Sands
has been influenced by Sickert, who has much
in common with Vuillard, as by Vuillard him-
self ; and most probable of all, perhaps, that
the three have inherited from a common an-
cestor something which each has developed and

SINCE CEZANNE

cultivated as seemed to him or her best.
La recherche de la paternite was ever an exciting
but hazardous pastime : if Bonnard and Vuil-
lard, in their turn, are claimed, as they some-
times are, for descendants of Renoir, with
equal propriety Sickert may be claimed for
Degas. And it is worth noting, perhaps, as a
curious fact, that in the matter of influence
this is about as much as at the moment can
be claimed for either of these masters. Both
Renoir and Degas lived well on into the period
of which I am writing ; but though both were
admired, the former immensely, neither up to
the present has had much direct influence on
contemporary painting.

From 1908 — I choose that year to avoid all
risk of ante-dating — there existed side by side,
and apparently in alliance, with the Fauves a
school of theoretical painters. Of Cubism I
have said my say elsewhere : if I have some
doubts as to whether, as a complete theory of
painting, it has a future, I have none that what
it has already achieved is remarkable. Also,
I recognize its importance as a school of ex-
periments, some of which are sure to bear fruit
and leave a mark on history. Of the merits of
many of its professors I say nothing, because
they are manifest and admitted. Picasso
stands apart : he is the inventor and most
eminent exponent, yet I refuse to call him
Cubist because he is so many other things.
24

SINCE CEZANNE

Braque, who at present confines himself to
abstractions, and to taste and sensibility adds
creative power, is to my mind the best of
the bunch : while Le*ger, Gris, Gleizes, and
Metzinger are four painters who, if they
did not limit themselves to a means of
expression which to most people is still per-
plexing, if not disagreeable, would be uni-
versally acclaimed for what they are — four
exceptionally inventive artists, each possessing
his own peculiar and precious sense of colour
and design.

But besides these pure doctrinaires there
were a good many painters who, without re-
ducing their forms to geometrical abstractions,
by modifying them in accordance with Cubist
theory gave a new and impressive coherence
to their compositions. Of them the best
known, in England at all events, is Jean Mar-
chand, whose admirable work has been ad-
mired here ever since the Grafton Galleries
exhibition of 1912. Lately he has moved
away from Cubism, but has not become less
doctrinaire for that. Indeed, if I have a fault
to find with his grave and masterly art it is
that sometimes it is a little wanting in sensibi-
lity and inspiration. Marchand is so deter-
mined to paint logically and well that he seems v
a little to forget that in the greatest art there is
more than logic and good painting. It is
odd to remember that Lhote, who since the

SINCE CEZANNE

war has been saluted by a band of young
painters (not French for the most part, I
believe) as chief of a new and profoundly doc-
trinaire school which is to reconcile Cubism
with the great tradition, stood at the time of
which I am writing pretty much where Mar-
chand stood. His undeniable gifts, which
have not failed him since, were then devoted
to combining the amusing qualities of the
imagiers (popular print-makers) with the new
discoveries. The results were consistently
pleasing ; and I will here confess that, however
little I may like some of his later preaching and
however little he may like mine, what Lhote
produces in paint never fails to arrest me and
very seldom to charm. Herbin, who was
another of those who about the year 1910 were
modifying natural forms in obedience to Cubist
theory, has since gone all lengths in the direc-
tion of pure abstraction : his art is none
the better for it. Valloton, so far as I can
remember, was much where Herbin was.
Now apparently he aims at the grand tragic ;
an aim which rarely fails to lead its votaries
by way of the grand academic. Perhaps such
aspirations can express themselves only in the
consecrated formulae of traditional rhetoric ;
at all events, the last I saw of Valloton was
furiously classical.* And for all that he re-

* His exhibits in the salon d'automne of 1921, however,
tuggest that he has come off his high horse.
26

SINCE CEZANNE

mains, what he was in the beginning, an
illustrator.

To me these artists all seem to be of the
first generation of Ce'zanne's descendants.
About the dates of one or two, however, I may
well be mistaken ; 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 war, in fact — to be of a slightly later
brood. For instance, it must have been at the
end of 1912, or the beginning of 1913, that I
first heard of Modigliani, Utrillo, Segonzac,
Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert Moreau and
Kisling, though doubtless all were known earlier
to wide-awake men on the spot. None of them
can fairly be described as doctrinaire : by that
time an artist with a pronounced taste for
abstractions betook himself to Cubism almost
as a matter of course. All owe much to
Cezanne — Utrillo least ; Modigliani and Marie
Laurencin owe a good deal to Picasso's blue
period ; while Luc-Albert Moreau owes some-
thing to Segonzac. Of the two first Modi-
gliani is dead and Utrillo so ill that he is un-
likely ever to paint again.* A strange artist,
Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani
was handsome enough, to satisfy the exigences
of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch

* With great pleasure I contradict this. According to
latest reports Utrillo is so far recovered that before long he
may be painting again.

27

SINCE CEZANNE

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 suburbs. Towards the
end, when he was already very ill, he began to
concoct a formula for dealing with these
melancholy scenes which might have been his
undoing. His career was of a few years only,
but those years were prolific ; beginning in a
rather old-fashioned, impressionistic style, he
soon found his way into the one he has made
famous. To judge his art as a whole is diffi-
cult: partly because his early productions are
not only unequal to, but positively unlike, what
he achieved later ; partly because many of the
Utrillos with which Paris is overstocked were
painted by someone else.

Perhaps the most interesting, though neither
the most startling nor seductive, of this batch
is Segonzac. Like all the best things in nature,
he matures slowly and gets a little riper every
day ; so, as he is already a thoroughly good
painter, like the nigger of Saint-Cyr he has but
to continue. Before nature, or rather cultiva-
tion, with its chocolate ploughed fields and
bright green trees, as before the sumptuous
splendours of a naked body, his reaction is
manifestly, flutteringly, lyrical. 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

SINCE CEZANNE

the shoulders of a gentleman of Gascony.
His emotions are kept severely in their place
by rigorous concentration on the art of paint-
ing. Nevertheless, there are critics who com-
plain that his compositions still tend to lack
organization and his forms definition. And
perhaps they do sometimes : only in' these, as
in other respects, his art improves steadily.*

" Sa peinture a une petite cote* vicieuse qui
est adorable " — I have heard the phrase so
often that I can but repeat it. Marie Lauren-
cin's painting is adorable ; we can never like
her enough for liking her own femininity so
well, and for showing all her charming talent
instead of smothering it in an effort to paint
like a man ; but she is not a great artist —
she is not even the best woman painter alive.
She is barely as good as Dufy (a contemporary
of Picasso unless I mistake, but for many years
known rather as a decorator and illustrator
than a painter in oils) who, while he confined
himself to designing for the upholsterers and
making " images," was very good indeed.
His oil-paintings are another matter. Dufy
has a formula for making pictures ; he has a
cliche for a tree, a house, a chimney, even for
the smoke coming out of a chimney. In this
way he can be sure of producing a pretty article,
and, what is more, an article the public likes.

* Salon d'automnet 1921 : It has again made a big stride
forward. Segonzac is now amongst the best painters inFrancc.
29

SINCE CEZANNE

Very different is the art of Kisling. Rarely
does he produce one of those pictures so appe-
tizing that one fancies they must be good to
eat. What you will find in his work, besides
much good painting, is a serious preoccupation
with the problem of externalizing in form an
aesthetic experience. And as, after all, that is
the proper end of art his work is treated with
respect by all the best painters and most under-
standing critics, though it has not yet scored a
popular success. " Kisling ne triche pas,"
says Andrd Salmon.

The war did not kill the movement : none
but a fool could have supposed that it would.
Nevertheless, it had one ghastly effect on con-
temporary painting. When I returned to Paris
in the autumn of 1919 I found the painters
whom I had known before the war developing,
more or less normally, and producing work
which fell nowise short of what one had come
to expect. I saw all that there was to be seen ;
I admired ; and then I asked one who had
already, before the war, established a style and
a reputation — I asked Friesz, I think — " Et
les jeunes ? " " Nous sommes les jeunes "
was the reply. Those young French painters
who should have been emerging from the
ruck of students between 1914 and 1919
had either been killed, or deflected from their
career, or gravely retarded. Only now is la
jeunesse beginning to give signs of vitality ;
30

SINCE CEZANNE

only now is a new crop coming to the surface ;
so now I will take the foolhardy risk of pro-
nouncing the names of a few who seem to me
to have given proof of undeniable talent —
Gabriel-Fournier, Favory, Lotiron, Soutine,
Corneau, Durey, Monzain, Richard, Guindet,
Togores, Gromaire, Alix, Halicka. I must
not be taken to assert that all of these are under
thirty, or that none was known to discerning
amateurs before the war, or in its first years
at any rate. Certainly, the work of Gabriel-
Fournier, Favory, Soutine, and I think of
Corneau, was known to me even, through photo-
graphs, before the Armistice was signed. As cer-
tainly I think it is true that all are of a later crop
than Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert
Moreau, etc., while Monzain, Richard, To-
gores, Gromaire, Alix, Guindet, and Halicka
are very young indeed. So here are a dozen
painters — most of them little known at present
outside a smallish circle of artists, critics, and in-
quisitive amateurs — who appear to give promise
of excellence : amongst them I should be inclined
to look for the masters of a coming age.*

* 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 things. It included
such names as Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck, Marchand,
Friesz, Maillol, Duncan Grant: one need not be laudator
temporis acti to feel that the men of the new generation are
on a smaller scale. This merely confirms my often expressed
notion that the decade 1875-85 produced a prodigious

31

SINCE CEZANNE

To this list I would add, in no spirit of
paradox, two names which, at first sight, must
appear singularly out of place — Camoin and
Gue'rin. Both were at work before the con-
temporary movement — the Cezanne move-
ment— was born or, at any rate, launched ;
both for a long time seemed to be, if anything,
opposed to it ; both for some years lay dormant
in a chrysalis-like state to emerge recently a
pair of very interesting painters. The Camoin
and the Guerin with whom I am concerned
appeared since the war ; they may, of course,
relapse into their former condition : time will
show. 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

quantity of greatly gifted babies. On the other hand, if by
comparison with the salon d'automne of 1911 that of '21
seems unexciting, we must not fail to do justice to the
extraordinarily high level of painting that has now been
attained. And this confirms another of my pet theories —
that we live in an age comparable (so far as painting goes)
with the quattro cento. The works of even the smallest artists
of that age enchant us now, because in that age any man of
any talent could make a picture; 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 came. The world moves faster now-
adays ; already we look regretfully back to the days when
Matisse and Picasso were launching the movement, and
another high renaissance may be nearer than we suppose.

SINCE CEZANNE

good artist may very legitimately draw from
another. So nourished, he seems to have made
a fresh start ; at any rate his work has now a
freshness and vivacity which in his younger
days he could never impart. The case of
Guerin is odder still. A passionate admirer of
Watteau, he would seem to have locked him-
self up in a rather sterile devotion to the
eighteenth century master. One must sup-
pose that there was something dead in his
appreciation, something recognized but unfelt,
and therefore not really understood. This
deadness came through into his work. Lack-
ing genuine inspiration, struggling in conse-
quence to impart life by tricks and conventions,
he occasionally allowed himself to tumble into
downright vulgarity. Suddenly, and without
renouncing any ancient loyalty, he has come
to life. It is Watteau that inspires him still ;
but the essential Watteau — Watteau the painter
— not that superficies which is more or less
familiar to every hack, be he limner or penman,
who dabbles in the eighteenth century. How
amusing to fancy that the just admiration now
felt for the genius of Watteau by those descen-
dants of Cezanne who formerly misesteemed
it has somehow put Gue*rin himself in the way
of becoming intimate with an art he had
formerly worshipped at a distance!

Though the war did not kill or even
cripple the movement, since the war there has
33 c

SINCE CEZANNE

been a change, or, at any rate, a change has
become apparent. To begin with, Picasso has,
in a sense, retired from public life — from the
life of the cafes and studios I mean — and in
isolation works out those problems that are
for ever presenting themselves to his restless
brain. The splendid fruit of his solitude we
saw last summer chez Paul Rosenberg. From
time to time Picasso still paints a Cubist pic-
ture— to keep his mind in — but he is hardly
to be reckoned a Cubist, and certainly not a
pure one. Of that school, which still flourishes
(exhibiting at la Section a" Or or rue de la
Baume the work of Braque, Gleizes, Leger,
Metzinger, Gris, Laurens, Lipsitz, Marcous-
sis, Henry Hayden, and the brilliant Irene
Lagut), Picasso is the inspiration, perhaps, but
not the chief. His influence in the western
world and on foreign painters in Paris is as
great as ever ; but the French, slightly vexed,
maybe, at having accepted so long the leader-
ship of a Spaniard, show signs of turning back
towards their national tradition. So, though
Picasso remains the animator of the doctrinaire
school or schools, Lhote may become the
master. It is the fashion, I know, not to take
his influence seriously. No matter how clever
a man he may be, Lhote — they say — is not a big
enough painter to be a chief. It may be so
— I suspect it is — yet we should not forget that,
besides being intelligent and capable of drawing
34

SINCE CEZANNE

more or less plausible inferences from premises
of his own choosing, Lhote can point to a
practice by no means despicable. For the rest,
he is the apostle of logic and discipline, and so
finds plenty to approve in the Cubist doctrine
and the French tradition from Poussin to David.
I do not know whether Bissiere is to be ranked
amongst his disciples — I should think not —
but Bissiere, a most attractive artist, is perhaps
significant of the new tendency in that he has
chosen to express a whimsical temperament in
terms of prim science. About the science of
picture-making, as the director of the National
Gallery calls it, he has little to learn. He knows
the masters, the Primitives especially, and has a
way, at once logical and fantastic, of playing on
their motifs which gives sometimes the happiest
results. Bissiere is too fanciful and odd ever to
be a chef cTecole or representative even ; but the
very fact that, being what he is, he has chosen
such means of expression is symptomatic.

So the doctrinaire side of the movement per-
sists, animated by Picasso, and schooled to some
extent by Lhote. The main current, how-
ever, has found another channel ; and, unless I
mistake, we are already in the second phase of
the movement — a phase in which the revela-
tions of Cezanne and Seurat and the elabora-
tions of their immediate descendants will be
modified and revitalized by the pressure and
spirit of the great tradition. The leader has
35

SINCE CEZANNE

already been chosen. Derain is the chief of
the new French school — a school destined
manifestly to be less cosmopolitan than its
predecessor. The tendency towards national-
ism everywhere is unmistakeable — a conse-
quence of the war, I suppose. It is useless to
deplore the fact or exult in it : one can but
accept it as one accepts the weather. Even
England has not escaped ; and it is to be noted
that our best painter, Duncan Grant, a des-
cendant of Cezanne who has run the whole
gamut of abstract experiment, is settling down,
without of course for a moment denying his
master, to exploit the French heritage, with
feet planted firmly in the English tradition —
the tradition of Gainsborough and Constable.
In France, where tradition is so much richer,
its weight will confine more closely and drive
more intensely the new spirit. One new ten-
dency— that which insists more passionately
than ever on order and organization — merely
continues the impetus given by Cezanne and
received by all his followers ; but another, more
vague, towards something which I had rather
call humanism than humanity, does imply, I
think, a definite breach with Cubism and the
tenets of the austerer doctrinaires. It is not
drama or anecdote or sentiment or symbolism
that this would bring back to the plastic arts,
but rather that mysterious yet recognizable
quality in which the art of Raffael excels — a
36

SINCE CEZANNE

calm, disinterested, and professional concern
with the significance of life as revealed directly
in form, a faint desire, perhaps, to touch by
a picture, a building, or a simple object of use
some curious over-tone of our aesthetic sense.
Deep in their quest of that borderland beauty
which is common to life and art French
painters are once again deeply concerned with
life : to borrow an idea from my next essay,
thay have chosen a new artistic problem. To
them, however, " life " does not mean what it
means to the sentimentalists or melodramatists,
nor even precisely what it meant to the Im-
pressionists. Contemporary French painting
has no taste for contemporary actualities.
By " life " it understands, not what is going on
in the street, but — what to be sure does go on
there because it goes on everywhere — the thing
that poets used to call " the animating spark."
About life, in that sense, the painters of the new
generation will, I fancy, have something to say.
They will come at it, not by drama or anecdote
or symbol, but, as all genuine artists have always
come at whatever possessed their imagina-
tions, by plastic expression, or — if you like
old-fashioned phrases — by creating significant
form. They will seek the vital principle in all
sorts of objects and translate it into forms of
every kind. That humane beauty after which
Derain strives is to be found, I said, in Raffael :
it is to be found also in the Parthenon.
37

SINCE CEZANNE

I think this preliminary essay should close,
as it began, on a note of humility and with an
explanation. Twenty years ago, when I was
an undergraduate, I remember reading just
after it was published M. Camille Mauclair's
little book on the Impressionists. Long ago
I ceased much to admire M. Mauclair's
writing : his theorizing and pseudo-science
now strike me as silly, and his judgements seem
lacking in perspicacity. But whatever I may
think of it now I shall not forget what I owe
that book. Even at Cambridge the spirit of
the age, which is said to pervade the air like
a pestilence, had infected me ; and I set out
on my first visit to Paris full of curiosity about
what was then the contemporary movement —
at its last gasp. My guide was M. Mauclair ;
his book it was that put me in the right way.
For by bringing me acquainted with current
theories and reputations, and by throwing me
into a fever of expectation, he brought my
aesthetic sensibilities to that state in which
they reacted swiftly and generously to the
pictures themselves. This, as I shall explain
in another essay, is, to my mind, the proper
function o£-eriticism. I shall never forget my
first visits to the Caillebotte collection ; and
in the unforgettable thrill of those first visits
M. Mauclair's bad science and erratic judge-
ment counted for something — much perhaps.
They put me into a mood of sympathetic ex-
38

SINCE CEZANNE

pectation ; and such a mood is, even for highly
sensitive people, often an indispensable pre-
liminary to aesthetic appreciation. There are
those who have got to be made to feel some-
thing before they can begin to feel for them-
selves— believe me, they are not the least
sensitive or genuine of amateurs : they are only
the most honest. I should like very much to
do for even one of them what M. Mauclair did
for me. It would be delightful to believe that
by putting him in the way of the best modern
painting and the theories concerning or con-
nected with it — theories which, it seems, for
some make it more intelligible — I was giving
his sensibility a serviceable jog. Everyone,
I know, must see with his own eyes and feel
through his own nerves ; none can lend another
eyes or emotions : nevertheless, one can point
and gesticulate and in so doing excite. If I
have done that I am content. Twenty years
hence, it is to be presumed, those who now read
my writings will be saying of them what I was
saying of M. Mauclair's. The prospect does
not distress me. I am not author enough to be
pained by the certainty that in ten years' time
this book will be obsolete. Like M. Mauclair's,
it will have served its turn ; and I make no
doubt there will be someone at hand to write
another, the same in purpose, and in execution
let us hope rather neater.

39

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

We all agree now — by "we" I mean intelli-
gent people under sixty — that a work of art
is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful be-
. cause it is like something else. Neither is a
work of art. Roses and works of art are
beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter
does not end there : a rose is the visible result
of an infinitude of complicated goings on in
the bosom of the earth and in the air above,
and similarly a work of art is the product of
strange activities in the human mind. In so
far as we are mere spectators and connoisseurs
we need not bother about these ; all we are
concerned with is the finished product, the
work of art. To produce the best eggs it may
be that hens should be fed on hot meal mash,
at is a question for the farmer. For us what
tters is the quality of the eggs, since it is
them and not hot meal mash that we propose
to eat for breakfast. Few, however, can take
quite so lordly an attitude towards art. We
contemplate the object, we experience the appro-
priate emotion, and then we begin asking
" Why? " and " How? " Personally, I am so
conscious of these insistent questions that, at
the risk of some misunderstanding, I habitually
describe works of art as " significant " rather
than " beautiful " forms. For works of art,
unlike roses, are the creations and expressions
of conscious minds. I beg that no theological
40

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

red herring may here be drawn across the
scent.

A work of art is an object beautiful, or signi-
ficant, in itself, nowise dependent for its value
on the outside world, capable by itself of pro-
voking in us that emotion which we call
aesthetic. Agreed. But men do not create
such things unconsciously and without effort,
as they breathe in their sleep. On the con-
trary, for their production are required special
energies and a peculiar state of mind. A
work of art, like a rose, is the result of a string
of causes : and some of us are so vain as to take
more interest in the operations of the human
mind than in fertilizers and watering-pots.

In the pre-natal history of a work of art I
seem to detect at any rate three factors — a sta
of peculiar and intense sensibility, the creativ
impulse, and the artistic problem. An artist,
I imagine, is one who often and easily is thrown
into that state of acute and sympathetic -agita-
tion which most of us, once or twice in our
lives, have had the happiness of experiencing.
And have you noticed that many men and most
boys, when genuinely in love, find themselves,
the moment the object of their emotion is with-
drawn, driven by their feelings into scribbling
verses ? An artist, I imagine, is always falling
in love with everything. Always he is being
thrown into a " state of mind." The sight
of a tree or an omnibus, the screaming of
4.

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

whistles or the whistling of birds, the smell of
roast pig, a gesture, a look, any trivial event
may provoke a crisis, filling him with an in-
tolerable desire to express himself. The artist
cannot embrace the object of his emotion.
He does not even wish to. Once, perhaps,
that was his desire ; if so, like the pointer and
the setter, he has converted the barbarous
pouncing instinct into the civilized pleasure of,
tremulous contemplation. Be that as it may,

-• the contemplative moment is short. Simul-j
taneously almost with the emotion arises the!;
longing to express, to create a form that shall j
match the feeling, that shall commemorate the
moment of ecstasy.

This moment of passionate apprehension^ is,
unless I mistake, the source of the creative im-
pulse ; indeed, the latter seems to follow so
promptly on the former that one is often
tempted to regard them as a single movement.

r The next step is longer. The creative impulse
is one thing ; creation another. If the artist's
form is to be the equivalent of an experience,

I if it is to be significant in fact, every scrap of it
has got to be fused and fashioned in the white
heat of his emotion. And how is his emotion
to be kept at white heat through the long, cold
days of formal construction ? Emotions seem
to grow cold and set like glue. The intense
power and energy called forth by the first
thrilling vision grow slack for want of incentive.
42

.

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

What engine is to generate the heat and make
taut the energies by which alone significant
form can be created ? That is where the
artistic problem comes in.

The artistic problem is the problem of '
making a match between an emotional ex-
perience and a form that has been conceived '
but not created. Evidently the conception of
some sort of form accompanies, or closely
follows, the creative impulse. The artist says,
or rather feels, to himself : I should like to ex-
press that in words, or in lines and colours,
or in notes. But to make anything out of
his impulse he will need something more than —
this vague desire to express or to create. He
wili need a definite, fully conceived form into
which his experience can be made to fit. And
this fitting, this matching of his experience
with his form, will be his problem. It will
serve the double purpose of concentrating his
energies and stimulating his intellect. It will
be at once a canal and a goad. And his energy -
and intellect between them will have to keep
warm his emotion. 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 sonnet.
Pindar, the most passionate of poets, drove and
pressed his feelings through the convolutions
of the ode. Bach wrote fugues. The master
of St. Vitale found an equivalent for his dis-
43

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

quieting ecstasies in severely stylistic portraits
wrought in an intractable medium. Giotto
expressed himself through a series of pictured
legends. El Greco seems to have achieved his
stupendous designs by labouring to make signi-
ficant the fustian of theatrical piety.

There is apparently nothing that an artist
cannot vivify. He can create a work of art
out of some riddle in engineering or harmonics,
an anecdote, or the frank representation of a
natural object. Only, to be satisfactory, the
problem must be for him who employs it a
goad and a limitation. A goad that calls forth
all his energies ; a limitation that focuses them
on some object far more precise and compre-
hensible than the expression of a vague sensi-
bility, or, to say the same thing in another way,
the creation of indefinite beauty. However
— much an artist may have felt, he cannot just
sit down and express it ; he cannot create form
in the vague. He must sit down to write a
play or a poem, to paint a portrait or a still life.

Almost everyone has had his moment of
ecstasy, and the creative impulse is not un-
common ; but those only who have a pretty
strong sense of art understand the necessity
for the artistic problem. What is known of it
by the public is not much liked ; it has a bad
name and is reckoned unsympathetic. For the
artistic problem, which limits the artist's free-
dom, fixes his attention on a point, and drives
44

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

his emotion through narrow tubes, is what im-
ports the conventional element into art. It
seems to come between the spontaneous thrill
of the artist and the receptive enthusiasm of his
public with an air of artificiality. Thus, a
generation brought up on Wordsworth could
hardly believe in the genuineness of Racine.
Our fathers and grandfathers felt, and felt
rightly, that art was something that came from
and spoke to the depths of the human soul. -"
But how, said they, should deep call to deep in
Alexandrines and a pseudo-classical convention,
to say nothing of full-bottomed wigs ? They
forgot to reckon with the artistic problem, 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 art. They thought that because the stuff
of art comes from the depths of human nature ~~
it can be expressed only in terms of naturalism.
They did not realize that the creating of an
equivalent for an aesthetic experience out of
natural speech or the common forms of nature is
only one amongst an infinite number of possible
problems. 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 rime. To them he would have ex-
pressed himself otherwise. Possibly : but what-
ever he experienced could not have become art

45

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

— significant form — till it had been withdrawn
from the world of experience and converted
into poetry by some such exacting problem.

One problem in itself is as good as another,
just as one kind of nib is as good as another,
since problems are valuable only as means.
That problem is best for any particular artist
that serves that particular artist best. The
ideal problem will be the one that raises his
power most while limiting his fancy least.
The incessant recourse of European writers to
dramatic form suggests that here is a problem
which to them is peculiarly favourable. Its
conventions, I suppose, are sufficiently strict
to compel the artist to exert himself to the ut-
most, yet not so strict as to present those appal-
ling technical difficulties — the sort presented
by a sestina or a chant royal — that make self-
expression impossible to any but a consummate
master. The novel, on the other hand, as we
are just beginning to suspect, affords for most
writers an unsatisfactory, because insufficiently
rigorous, problem. Each age has its favourites.
Indeed, the history of art is very; much the
history of the problem. The stuff of art is
always the same, and always it must be con-
verted into form before it can become art ;
it is in their choice of converting-machines
that the ages differ conspicuously.

Two tasks that painters and writers some-
times set themselves are often mistaken for
46

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

artistic problems, but are, in fact, nothing of
the sort. One is literal representation : the
other the supply of genius direct from the cask.
To match a realistic form with an aesthetic
experience is a problem that has served well
many great artists : Chardin and Tolstoi will do
as examples. To make a realistic form and
match it with nothing is no problem at all.
Though to say just what the camera would
say is beyond the skill and science of most of us,
it is a task that will never raise an artist's tem-
perature above boiling-point. A painter may
go into the woods, get his thrill, go home and
fetch his panel-box, and proceed to set down
in cold blood what he finds before him. No
good can come of it, as the gloomy walls of any
official exhibition will show. Realistic novels
fail for the same reason : with all their gifts,
neither Zola, nor Edmond de Goncourt, nor
Mr. Arnold Bennett ever produced a work of
art. Also, a thorough anarchist will never be
an artist, though many artists have believed
that they were thorough anarchists. One man
cannot pour an aesthetic experience straight
into another, leaving out the problem. He
cannot exude form : he must set himself to
create a particular form. Automatic writing
will never be poetry, nor automatic scrabbling
design. The artist must submit his creative
impulse to the conditions of a problem. Often
great artists set their own problems ; always
47

THE ARTISTIC PROBLEM

they are bound by them. That would be a
shallow critic who supposed that Mallarme"
wrote down what words he chose in what order
he pleased, unbound by any sense of a definite
form to be created and a most definite concep-
tion to be realized. Mallarme was as severely
bound by his problem as was Racine by his.
It was as definite — for all that it was unformu-
lated — as absolute, and as necessary. The
same may be said of Picasso in his most ab-
stract works : but not of all his followers, nor
of all Mallarme"s either.

48

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

Was he really a great painter ? A new genera-
tion is beginning to ask the question that we
answered, once and for all as we thought, ten
years ago. Yes, of course, the douanier was —
a remarkable painter. The man who influenced
Derain, and to some extent Picasso, is not
likely to have been less. But a great painter ?
For the present, at any rate, let us avoid great
words.

In 1903, when first I lived in Paris, Rous-
seau appeared to be very much " in the move-
ment." That was because by nature he was
what thoughtful and highly trained artists
were making themselves by an effort : he was
direct. To us it seemed, in those days, that a
mass of scientific irrelevancies and intellectual
complications had come between the artist and
his vision, and, again, between the vision and
its expression. In a desperately practical and
well-organized age, which recognized objects
by their labels and never dreamed of going
beneath these to discover the things them-
selves, artists, we thought, were in danger of
losing the very stuff of which visual art is
made — the direct, emotional reaction to the
visible universe. People had grown so fami-
liar with the idea of a cup, with that purely
intellectual label " cup," that they never looked
at a particular cup and felt its emotional signi-
ficance. Also, professional painters had pro-
49 D

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

vided themselves with a marvellous scientific
apparatus for describing " the idea of a cup "
in line and colour : they had at their fingers'
ends a plastic notation that corresponded with
the labels by which things are intellectually
recognized. They neither felt things nor ex-
pressed their feelings. For even when an
artist was capable of a direct, 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 apprenticed. A determination
to free artists from utilitarian vision and the
disastrous science of representation was the
theoretic basis of that movement which is as-
sociated with the name of Cezanne.

From the latter, at any rate, the douanier
needed no freeing. Such science as he ac-
quired in the course of his life was a means to
expressing himself and not to picture-making.
As for his vision, that was as direct and first-
hand as the vision of a Primitive or a child ;
and to a Primitive his admirers were in the
habit of likening him, to a child his detractors.
His admirers were right : his art is not childish.
Primitives, because they are artists, have to
grapple with the artistic problem. They have,
that is, to create form that will express an
emotional conception ; they have to express
their sense of something they have seen and
felt. A child may well have an artistic vision ;
5°

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

for all that, a child is never, or hardly ever,
an artist. It wrestles with no problem because
it does not try to express anything. It is a
mere symbolist who uses a notation not to
express what it feels but to convey information.
A child's drawing of a horse is not an ex-
pression of its sense of a horse, but a symbol by
which other people can recognize that what
occupies a certain position in its figured story
is a horse. The child is not an artist, but an
illustrator who uses symbolism. When, using
Mr. Bertrand Russell's new symbolism, I say
that Lc3ni — Cct=the Almighty, clearly I am
not expressing my feeling for infinite and
omnipotent goodness. Neither does the child
who teases you to look at its charming coloured
diagram of the farmyard expect you to share an
emotional experience. Doubtless the vanity
of the craftsman demands satisfaction ; but
chiefly the child wishes to assure itself that
some impartial judge can interpret its notation.
One definitely artistic gift, however, many
children do possess, and that is a sense of the
decorative possibilities of their medium. This
gift they have in common with the Primitives ;
and this the douanier possessed in an extra-
ordinary degree.

Of Rousseau's sense of the decorative pos-
sibilities of paint it is, I suppose, unnecessary
to say anything. Gauguin called his black
" inimitable." But, indeed, we all agree now
51

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

that, if the term " decorative " is to be used
in this limited and rather injurious sense,
Rousseau, as a decorator, takes rank with the
very greatest. More important is it to realize
that Rousseau had his problem ; and that he
approached it in the spirit of a Primitive.
His reactions were as simple and genuine as
those of any child ; he experienced them with
that passion which alone provokes to creation ;
his problem was to express them sincerely and
simply in the medium of which he could make
such exquisite use. His vision was as un-
sophisticated as that of Orcagna, and in trans-
lating it he was as conscientious ; but he was a
smaller artist because he was less of an artist.

It has been said that Rousseau came short
of greatness for want of science. That I do
not believe. 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 clear,
intense, and clamoring for expression in his
mind ? I see no reason for supposing that
Rousseau ever failed from lack of science to
express himself completely. The fault was in
what he had to express. Rousseau was in-
ferior to the great Primitives because he lacked
their taste, or, to put the matter more forcibly,
because he was less of an artist. An artist's
conception should be like a perfectly cooked
pudding — cooked all through and in every

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

part. His problem is to create an expressive
form that shall fit exactly an artistic concep-
tion. His subject may be what he pleases.
But unless that subject has been carried to the
high regions of art, and there, in a dry aesthetic
atmosphere, sealed up in a purely aesthetic
conception it can never be externalized in
pure form. That is what the great Primitives
did, and what the douanier could not do always.
In his pudding there are doughy patches.
He is sentimental ; and he is not sentimental
as Raphael and El Greco are.

With a race of genteel, but strangely obtuse,
critics it was formerly the fashion to depreciate
Raphael and El Greco on the ground that they
were sentimental. Sentimental they are, in a
sense. Their subjects are sentimental ; and
the religiosity of some of Greco's is downright
disgusting. But of these subjects every scrap
has been passed through the blazing furnace
of conception and fused into artistic form.
It is as though a potter, working with dirty
hands, had left a stain burnt by the fire into his
gloriously fashioned clay. The blemish is
superficial ; the form is untouched. With
Rousseau it is otherwise : lumps of unfused
matter break through his conception and into
his design ; his pudding is not thoroughly
baked. Take that well-known picture of his,
Le Present et le Passe, which used to be in
the Jastrebzoff collection, and of which photo-
53

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

graphs are familiar to everyone : the two silly,
detached heads in the sky, stuck in for senti-
ment's sake, are, as the saying goes, " out of
the picture " and yet play the devil with it.
They injure the design. What is more, in
themselves they are as feeble and common-
place as the drawing of a pavement artist, which,
in fact, they resemble. They are unfelt, that
is the explanation — unfelt aesthetically. They
have not been through the oven. They are
artistically insincere. Sentimentality makes
strange bedfellows. Rousseau has slipped in-
to the very hole wherein Mr. Frank Dixie
and Sir Luke Fildes disport themselves ; only,
by betraying his vice in a picture, that is, for
the most part, so exquisitely sure in its simple,
delicate expression of a frank and charming
vision he gives us an impressive example of
the danger, even to a good artist, of bad taste.
And there is another fault in Rousseau that
springs from this lack of complete artistic
integrity. He is something plebeian : he
suffers a slightly self-complacent good-fellow-
ship to creep into his pictures. Occasionally
there grins through his design, and ever so
little disfigures it, a touch of fatuity. He can-
not help being glad that he is so simple and so
good, nor quite resist telling us about it.
Look at that portrait of himself — and I impose
a most agreeable task, for it is charming —
that portrait dated 1890, and belonging also
54

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

to M. Jastrebzoff; do you not feel that the
author is a little too well pleased with himself ?
Do you not fancy that he will soon be regaling
his sitter with a good, round platitude from
the exterior boulevards or a morsel from some
regimental ditty in which he once excelled,
that, in another moment, he will be tapping
him on the back, and that he has gone a little
out of his way to tell you these things ? The
Primitives tell us nothing of that sort ; they
stick to their business of creating significant
form. Whatever of their personalities may
reach us has passed through the transmuting
fires of art : they never prattle. The Primi-
tives are always distinguished ; whereas oc-
casionally the douanier is as much the reverse
as the more successful painters to the British
aristocracy are always.

Yet I daresay it was this jovial and unaffected
good-fellowship, quite as much as his un-
questionable genius, that won the brave doua-
nier his place in the hearts of those brilliant
people who frequented what he used to call
his " soirees toutes familiales et artistiques."
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 Rous-
seau. Whatever the real differences between a
noble savage and an unspoilt artisan may be, the
55

THE DOUANIER ROUSSEAU

difference between the ideas of them with which
a jaded society diverts itself is negligible. " II
nous faut les barbares," said Gide. Well, we have
got them.* And, maybe, the next generation but
one will make as much fuss about a new Matthew
Arnold as we made about Marguerite Audoux.
Meanwhile the' douanier came at the right
moment. His " soire'es toutes familiales et
artistiques " were crowded with admirers —
Picasso, Delaunay, Duhamel, Guillaume Apol-
linaire, Jules Remain, Max Jacob, Rene* Arcos,
Braque, Andre* Salmon, Soffici, Blanche Al-
bane, Marie Laurencin, elegant and eminent
people from North and South America, Russia,
Germany, and Scandinavia, to say nothing of
his pupils (he professed both painting and
music) and " les demoiselles de son quartier."
The entertainment consisted, if I may trust an
ear-witness, of a little bad music worse played,
a little declamation, a glass of wine, and demo-
cracy untainted with the least suspicion of
snobbery. There was a delicious absence of
culture, on the one hand, and of romantic
squalor on the other. The whole thing was
solidly and sympathetically lower middle-class.
The " soiree tant familiale qu'artistique "
closed with a performance of the Marseillaise ;
and the intelligentsia retired to bed feeling that
life was full of beauty and significance.

* This essay was written a few weeks after the signing of
the Armistice.

56

MATISSE

(Photo: E. Druei)

CEZANNE*

It was the opinion of Degas that " le peintre
en gdndral est bete," and most people seem
to think that Ce'zanne was no exception to
the rule. Before agreeing, I should want to
know what precisely they understood by the
word " bete." Cezanne was silly certainly,
but he was not stupid : he was limited and ab-
surd, but not dull ; his opinions for the most
part were conventional, but his intelligence was
not common ; and his character was as ob-
viously that of a man of genius as the most
ardent hero-worshipper could desire.

Ce'zanne was a great character. It is a mis-
take to suppose that great characters are always
agreeable ones. Few people, I imagine, found
Ce'zanne agreeable ; yet painters, one would
suppose, were eager to meet him that they might
hear what he had to say about painting.
Cezanne's ideas on painting are not like ideas
at all : they are like sensations ; they have the
force of sensations. They seem to give the
sense of what was in his mind by a method
more direct than the ordinary intellectual one.
His meaning reaches us, not in a series of
pellets, but in a block. These sayings of his
remind one oddly of his art ; and some of his
comments on life are hardly less forcible and
to the point. This, for instance, provoked by

* Paul Ctzanne. Par Ambroise Vollard. (Paris : Cr&.
P. 750

57

CEZANNE

Zola's " L'GEuvre," is something more than
a professional opinion :

On ne peut pas exiger d'un homme qui ne sait pas, qu'il
disc des choses raisonnables sur 1'art de peindre ; mais, N. de
D — et Cezanne se mit a taper comme un sourd sur sa table
— comment peut-il oser dire qu'un peintre se tue parce qu'il
a fait un mauvais tableau ? Quand un tableau n'est pas
realise", on le f . . . au feu, et on en recommence un autre !

Realise — Ce'zanne's incessant complaint that
" he was unable to realize " has been taken by
many stupid people to imply that Cezanne was
conscious in himself of some peculiar and
slightly humiliating inhibition from which his
fellows were free ; and even M. Vollard has
thought it necessary to be continually apologiz-
ing for and explaining away the phrase, which,
moreover, he never does explain. Yet the
explanation is as simple as can be. Genius of
the very highest order never, probably, suc-
ceeds in completely realizing its conceptions,
because its conceptions are unrealizable. When
Ce'zanne envied M. Bouguereau his power of
realization he was perfectly sincere and per-
fectly sensible. A Bouguereau can realize
completely the little nasty things that are in
his mind : if a Ce'zanne, a Shakespeare, or an
^schylus could realize as completely all that
was in his the human race would think more
of itself than it does. Cezanne's conscious-
ness of the impossibility of realizing com-
pletely his conceptions — his consciousness,

CEZANNE

rather, that he had not completely realized
them — made him regard all his pictures as un-
finished. Some day, he thought — or liked to
believe — he would push them a little further.
His habit of destroying his own works, how-
ever, had nothing to do with any sense of
failure or incapacity. It was simply a mani-
festation of rage and a means of appeasement.
Some people like cups and saucers : Ce'zanne
preferred oil-paintings, and his own were al-
ways to hand. A word of commendation for
" les professeurs " (" qui n'ont rien dans le ven
. . n . . tr . . re — les salauds — les chatres
— les j . f . . . s ") or the least denigration
of Chardin or Delacroix was sure to cost a still-
life or a water-colour at any rate.

It is surprising that M. Vollard should not
have made this more clear, for he certainly
understood the genius and character of Ce'zanne.
His book is an amazingly vivid presentment of
both ; 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 feat. For
Ce'zanne poured all his prodigious energy and
genius into a funnel that ended in the point
of his brush. He was a painter if ever there
was one, and he was nothing else ; he had no
notion of being anything else. There is
enough in Paris, one would have supposed,
to attract from himself for a moment the atten-
tion of the most preoccupied and self-absorbed
59

CEZANNE

of men. When Ce'zanne lived in Paris he
rose early, painted as long as there was light
to paint by, and went to bed immediately after
dinner. The time during which he was not
painting he seems to have spent in wondering
whether the light would be satisfactory (" gris
clair ") next day. Ce'zanne in Paris, like the
peasant in the country, spent most of his spare
time thinking about the weather.

Comme il se couchait de tres bonne heure, il lui arrivait de
s'eveiller au milieu de la nuit. Hante par son idee fixe, il
ouvrait la fenetre. Une fois rassure, avant de regagner son
lit il allait, une bougie a la main, revoir 1'etude qui etait en
train. Si 1'impression etait bonne, il reveillait sa femme pour
lui faire partager sa satisfaction. Et pour la dedommager de
ce derangement, il 1'invitait a faire une partie de dames.

All of Cezanne went into his painting ;
only now and then a drop escaped that voracious
funnel and splashed on to life. It is by col-
lecting and arranging these odd drops and
splashes that M. Vollard has managed to con-
struct his lively picture of this extraordinary
character. 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 hero. It is
annoying, nevertheless, to hear quite so much
of the stupid and insensitive people who at-
tacked and insulted Ce'zanne. M. Vollard
never tires of telling us about those who hid
60

CEZANNE

their Ce*zannes or threw them out of window,
or sold them for next to nothing and would
now give their eyes to get them back ; of those
who jeered at Ce'zanne and would not hang his
pictures at exhibitions, refusing him that public
recognition he was human enough to covet —
in a word, of the now discomfited and penitent
majority. I had thoughts once of printing a
selection from the press-cuttings that reached
us at the Grafton Galleries during the first
Post-Impressionist exhibition. It would have
revealed our leading critics and experts, our
professors and directors, our connoisseurs, our
more cultivated dealers and our most popular
painters vying with each other in heaping abuse
and ridicule on the heads of Ce'zanne, Gauguin,
and Van Gogh. The project is abandoned.
That sort of thing I perceive becomes a bore.
And I only wish M. Vollard had perceived it
when he was writing about Zola. Zola failed
to appreciate Cezanne, of course. Zola was
an ordinary middle-class man : he was vain,
vulgar, petty ; he longed for the consideration
of people like himself, and was therefore
ostentatious ; he had a passion for money and
notoriety ; he wanted to be thought not only
clever but good ; he preached, he deprecated,
he took a moral standpoint and judged by re-
sults ; and his taste was execrable. We meet
people of Zola's sort every day in third-class
railway carriages and first, on the tops of omni-
61

CEZANNE

buses and in Chelsea drawing-rooms, at the
music-hall, at the opera, at classical concerts,
and in Bond Street galleries. We take them
for granted and are perfectly civil to them.
So why, because he happened to have an
astonishing gift of statement and rapid generali-
zation, should Zola be treated as though he
were a monster ? Though Diggle, the bil-
liards champion, care little or nothing for poetry,
he may have an excellent heart, as well as a
hand far surpassing in dexterity that of our
most accomplished portrait-painters. No one
dreams of reviling him.

Let us be equally just to Zola ; let us notice,
too, how amusingly he sets off Cezanne. Both
were greatly gifted men : neither was the man
of intelligence and talent, the brilliant man with
the discursive intellect, who carries his gift
about with him, takes it out when and where he
pleases, and applies it where and how he likes.
Zola, when he was not using his gift, posed as
an artist, a saint, or simply " a great man " ;
but he never contrived to be anything but a
bourgeois — & " sale bourgeois," according to
Cezanne. Cezanne was all gift : seen as any-
thing but a painter he looked like a fool. At
Aix he tried to pass for a respectable rentier :
he found no difficulty in being silly, but he
could not achieve the necessary commonplace-
ness. He could not be vulgar. He was al-
ways an artist.

62

CEZANNE

Instead of telling us so much about Zola and
tutti quanti M. Vollard might have told us more
about Ce'zanne's artistic development. What,
for instance, is the history of his relations with
Impressionism ? The matter is to me far
from clear. Cezanne began his artistic life
amongst the Impressionists, he was reckoned a
disciple of Pissarro ; yet it is plain from his
early work that he never swallowed much of the
doctrine. Gradually he came to think that
the Impressionists were on the wrong tack,
that their work was flimsy and their theory
misleading, that they failed to " realize."
He dreamed of combining their delicate vision,
their exquisite sensation^ with a more positive
and elaborate statement. He wanted to make
of Impressionism " quelque chose de solide
et de durable comme Tart des Muse*es." He
succeeded. But at what moment did his dis-
sent become acute, and to what extent was he
aware from the first of its existence ? To-
wards the end of his life he took to scolding the
Impressionists, but one fancies that he was
never very willing that anyone else should
abuse them. " Regardez," said he to a young
painter who had caught him coming out of
church one stormy Sunday morning, as he
pointed to a puddle touched by a sudden ray of
sunlight, " comment voulez-vous rendre cela ?
II faut se me'fier, je vous le dis, des Impression-
nistes . . . Tout de mSme, ils voient juste 1 "

CEZANNE

The critical moment in Cezanne's life — if in
such a life one moment may without impertin-
ence be thought more critical than another —
must have come somewhere about 1870.
M. Vollard once asked him what he did during
the war. " Ecoutez un peu, monsieur Vollard!
Pendant la guerre j'ai beaucoup travail!^ sur
le motif a 1'Estaque." M. Vollard is too good
a patriot to add that during the war he also
went into hiding, having been called up for
military service. Cezanne, I am sorry to say,
was an insoumis — a deserter. He seems to
have supposed that he had something more
important to do than to get himself killed for
his country. It was not only in art that
Cezanne gave proof of a surprisingly sure sense
of values. Some fulsome journalist, wishing
to flatter the old man after he had become
famous, represented him hugging a tree and,
with tears in his eyes, crying : " Comme je
voudrais, celui-la, le transporter sur ma toile! "
For a moment Ce'zanne contemplated the pic-
ture in terrified amazement, then exclaimed :
" Dites, monsieur Vollard, c'est effrayant, la
vie! " Useless to blame the particular im-
becile : it was the world in which such things
were possible that filled him with dismay.
I stretch my hand towards a copy of the
Burlington Magazine and come plumb on the
following by the present Director of the Tate
Gallery :

64

CEZANNE

The truth is that the ecstasy of art and good actions are
closely interrelated, the one leading to the other in endless
succession or possibly even progression.

" Dites, monsieur Vollard, c'est efTrayant, la
vie ! "*

* Since writing these words I learn that the director of the
Tate Gallery has been unable to find, in his series of vast
rooms, space for two small and fine works by Cezanne. It
is some consolation to know that he has found space for
more than twenty by Professor Tonks.

6

RENOIR*

Renoir is the greatest painter alive.f There
are admirers of Matisse and admirers of
Picasso who will contradict that, though the
artists themselves would probably agree. Also,
there are admirers of M. Bouguereau and of
Sir Marcus Stone, there are Italian Futurists
and members of the New English Art Club,
with whom one bandies no words. Renoir is
the greatest painter alive.

He is over forty : to be exact, he is seventy-
seven years old. Yet, in the teeth of modern
theories that have at least the air of physio-
logical certainties, one must admit that he is
still alive. A comparison between the five-
and-thirty photographs reproduced by M.
Besson and those at the end of Herr Meier-
Graefe's monograph suggests that even since
1910 his art has developed. But what is
certain is that, during his last period, since
1900 that is to say, though so crippled by
rheumatism that it is with agonizing difficulty
he handles a brush, he has produced works
that surpass even the masterpieces of his middle
age.

Renoir was born in 1841, and in '54 bound
prentice to a china-painter. A fortunate in- j
vention deprived him of this means of liveli-
hood and drove him into oil. He escaped

* Renoir. Par Albert Andre. Cres et Cie.

f This essay was written in 1919. He died in 1920.

66

RENOIR

early from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and, of
course, came under the influence of Courbet.
By 1863 he was being duly refused at the
Salon and howled at by the respectable mob.
He thus made one of the famous Salon des
Refuses^ and has, in consequence, been generally
described as an " Impressionist." It is an
honour he neither desires nor deserves. The
pure doctrine of Impressionism, as formulated
by Claude Monet, enjoins " scientific truth "
and submission to Nature, whereas Renoir ob-
served one day to an astonished disciple, " Avec
la Nature on ne fait rien " ; and on being asked
where, then, the student should learn his art
added, without any apparent sign of shame or
sense of sin — " Au muse*e, parbleul "

Renoir thus affirmed what every artist
knows, that art is the creation and not the imita-
tion of form. In his eyes the most valuable
part of an artist's education is the intelligent
study of what other artists have done. For
his own part he studied Courbet and then
Delacroix, and, assuredly, from these picked
up useful hints for converting sensibility into
significant form. Sensibility he never lacked.
Renoir's painting gift may, without unpardon-
able silliness, be compared with the singing gift
of Mozart. His conspicuous characteristics
are loveliness and ease. No painter, I suppose,
gives more delight, or gives it more frankly.
That is why his name provokes an odd, personal
6?

RENOIR

enthusiasm in thousands of people who have
never seen him. That is why Frenchmen,
who have sometimes a terribly intimate way
of explaining themselves, have been known to
assert that they feel for Renoir the sort of grate-
ful affection that every sensitive man feels for a
woman who has given him joy.

But Renoir's natural masters — parents one
would say if a man could have more than two —
were Fragonard, Boucher, and Watteau. These,
two of whom he has surpassed, with Rubens,
whom he almost equals, are responsible for
most of what is derivative in his art during
his first great period (1870-1881). That this
should be the period beloved of amateurs does
not surprise me. It is the period of Mme.
Mattre (1871), La Loge (1874), Moulin de
la Galette (1876), and M. Choquet — " portrait
d'un fou par un fou," Renoir calls it — pictures
of ravishing loveliness to set dancing every
chord in a spectator of normal sensibility.
Also, it is a period that has an extraordinary
charm for the literary connoisseur. It throws
glamour over the " seventies," and, for that
matter, on to the " eighties." Here are the
characters of Flaubert and Maupassant as we
should wish them to be. That dejeuner by the
Seine was probably organized by the resource-
ful Jean de Servigny, and there, sure enough.,
is Yvette with a fringe. The purest of painters
becomes historical by accident. He expresses
68

RENOIR

the unalloyed sensibility of an artist in terms of
delicious contemporary life and gives us,
adventitiously, romance. A fascinating period,
but not the great one.

Towards the end of 1 8 8 1 Renoir set out on a
tour in Italy, and, as if to show how little he
was affected by what he found there, painted at
Naples a large and important Baigneuse (now
in the Durand-Ruel collection) in which I can
discover not the slightest trace of Italian in-
fluence. He is too thorough a Frenchman
to be much of anything else. The emphatic
statement and counter-statement of the great
Primitives is not in his way. He prefers to
insinuate. Even in his most glorious moments
he is discreet and tactful, fonder of a transition
than an opposition, never passionate. The
new thing that came into his art about this
time, and was to affect it for the next twenty
years, was not Italy but Ingres.

The influence was at first an unhappy one.
During three or four years, unable, it seems,
to match the new conception of form with his
intensely personal reaction, Renoir produced a
certain number of unconvincing and un-
characteristic pictures (e.g., the dance series,
Dance a la Ville, etc.). There is an uneasy
harshness about the contours, the forms are
imperfectly felt, they are wooden even, and in
their placing one misses the old inevitability.
Signed with another name these essays might
69

RENOIR

by a dashing critic be called doctrinaire.
Then in 1885 came the first Baigneuses (col-
lection J. E. Blanche), whereby Renoir put
himself a good head above all contemporaries
save Cezanne. If this picture were hung in a
public gallery, and the numerous drawings
made for it ranged alongside, how finely dis-
credited would be those knowing ones who,
in their desire to emphasize the difference be-
tween form and that of which form is composed,
are in the habit of calling Renoir a great colour-
ist and then pausing impressively. I suppose
it is because he rarely uses a lead pencil that
the wiseacres are able to fulfil their destiny.
Drawing in charcoal or pastel need not be
taken seriously ; while drawing with the
brush is apparently not drawing at all. That
Renoir is a great draughtsman may be inferred
from almost everything he has ever done.
But (though that amazing Boy with a Cat was
achieved as early as 1868) it is the work of
this period — and Les Baigneuses, with its
attendant studies, are capital examples — that
makes patent his mastery and entitles him
obviously to a place between Ingres and
Daumier.

That it should be difficult to find a date for
the beginning of Renoir's last period does not
much trouble me ; but I am sorry that it is
quite impossible to indicate in words its
character. One can say confidently that the
70

RENOIR

new conception was being elaborated between
1895 anc^ 1900; one can suppose that its
final character was to some extent imposed
on the master by his growing infirmities. A
painter who can hardly move arm or fingers
will neither sweep nor niggle. He must paint,
if he is to paint at all, in blobs and smears and
patches and soft strokes ; and it is out of these
that Renoir's latest works are built up. " Built
up " — the expression is absurd. Rather, it is
as though forms had been melted down to their
component colours, and the pool of iridescent
loveliness thus created fixed by a touch of the
master's magic — lightly frozen over by an en-
chanting frost. Only ice is cold. At any
rate, what happens to the spectator is that first
he perceives a tangle of rather hot and ap-
parently inharmonious tones ; gradually he
becomes aware of a subtle, astonishing, and
unlooked-for harmony ; finally, from this
harmony emerge completely realized and ex-
quisitely related forms. After which, if he
has any sense of art, he remains spellbound
and uncritical, and ceases to bother about how
the thing was done. That, at least, is my im-
pression of Renoir's latest style. Examples
of it abound in Paris, notably M. Maurice
Gangnat's collection ; and it is said that the
artist intends these pictures to improve by
keeping.

In his pleasant, well-written introduction

RENOIR

M. Albert Andre gives a portrait of Renoir
that is almost too good to be true: we are
encouraged to believe just what we should
like to believe. It is incredibly sympathetic.
Yet it is very much what we might have
guessed from the pictures had we dared.
And, indeed, we did dare — some of us ;
for, besides its purely aesthetic character, its
French taste and tact, the art of Renoir has
over-tones to which the literary and historical
intelligence cannot choose but listen. An
intimate eulogy of France by a most lovable
Frenchman is what, in our lazy moods, we
allow these pictures to give us. They do
it charmingly. For instance, though I never
saw a Renoir that could justify a district
visitor in showing more of her teeth than
nature had already discovered, here, unmistak-
ably, are Parisians enjoying themselves in
their own Parisian way. Here is the France
of the young man's fancy and the old man's
envious dreams. Here, if you please, you may
smell again that friture that ate so well, one
Sunday at Argenteuil, twenty years ago, in the
company of a young poet who must have had
genius and two models who were certainly
divine. And that group with the fat, young
mother suckling her baby — there is all French
frankness and French tenderness and family
feeling without a trace of its wonted grimness
and insincerity.

72

RENOIR

Renoir is as French as French can be, and
he knows it :

Lorsque je regarde les maitres anciens je me fais 1'effet
d'un bien petit bonhomme, et pourtant je crois que de tous
mes ouvrages il restera assez pour m'assurer une place dans
1'^cole francaise, cette dcole que j'aime tant, qui est si gentille,
si ckire, de si bonne compagnie ... Et pas tapageuse.

Renoir will have his place in that school,
but another niche has been prepared for him
amongst an even grander company. When,
in 1917, Les Parapluies (a beautiful but not
very characteristic work) was placed in the
National Gallery some hundred English artists
and amateurs seized the opportunity of sending
the master a testimony of their admiration
which, rather to their surprise and to their in-
tense joy, apparently gave pleasure. In this
they said :

Des Pinstant ou votre tableau s'est trouve install^ parmi
les chefs-d'oeuvre des maitres anciens, nous avons eu la joie
de constater qu'un de nos contemporains avait pris place
d'emble'e parmi les grands maitres de la tradition europe*enne.

They said not a word too much.

73

TRADITION & MOVEMENTS

Much to its embarrassment, the National
Gallery finds itself possessed of that superb
picture Les Parapluies ; and as the director at
last feels obliged to exhume those masterpieces
which, for so many happy months, he and
his colleagues have had, albeit in the dark, to
themselves, we can now see Renoir amongst
his peers. He is perfectly at home there.
Renoir takes his place quite simply in the
great tradition ; and when Cezanne, who is
still too cheap to be within the reach of a
national collection, has attained a price that
guarantees respectability he, too, will be seen
to fit neatly into that tradition ofwhich he is as
much a part as Ingres or Poussin, Raphael or
Piero della Francesca.

That Cezanne was a master, just as Poussin
and Piero were, and that he, like them, is part
of the tradition, is what all sensitive people
know and the wiser keep to themselves. For
by stating the plain fact that Renoir, Cezanne,
and, for that matter, Matisse are all in the
great tradition of painting one seems to sug-
gest that the tradition is something altogether
different from what most people would wish
it to be. If one is right it follows that it is
not simply the counter-movement to the con-
temporary movement ; indeed, it follows that
it is not a movement at all. This is intolerable.
An artist, seen as the protagonist of a move-
74

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

ment, the exponent of a theory, and the clue
to an age, has a certain interest for all active-
minded people ; whereas, seen merely as an
artist, which is how he must be seen if
he is to be seen in the tradition, he is of
interest only to those who care for art. The
significant characteristics of an artist, con-
sidered as the representative of a movement,
are those in which he differs most from other
artists; set him in the traditions and his one
important characteristic is the one he shares
with all — his being an artist. In the tradition
a work of art loses its value as a means. We
must contemplate it as an end — as a direct
means to aesthetic emotion rather — or let it be.
Tradition, in fact, has to do with art alone ;
while with movements can be mixed up history,
archaeology, philosophy, politics, geography,
fashions, religion, and crime. So, by insisting
on the fact that Matisse, Cezanne, Poussin,
Piero, and Giotto are all in the tradition we
insist on the fact that they are all artists. We
rob them of their amusing but adscititious
qualities ; we make them utterly uninteresting
to precisely 99.99 per cent, of our fellow-
creatures ; and ourselves we make un-
popular.

The tradition of art begins with the first

artist that ever lived, and will end with the last.

Always it is being enriched or modified —

never is it exhausted. The earliest artists are

75

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

driven to creation by an irresistible desire to
express themselves. Their over-bubbling
minds supply abundance of matter ; diffi-
culties begin when they try to express it.
Then it is they find themselves confronted by
those terrible limitations of the human mind,
and by other limitations, only less terrible,
imposed by the medium in which they work.
Every genuine artist — every artist, that is,
with something of his own to say — is faced
afresh by the problem, and must solve it for
himself. Nevertheless, each one who succeeds
in creating an appropriate form for his peculiar
experience leaves in that form a record, and
from the sum of these records is deduced some-
thing, less definite far than a code, by no means
a pattern or recipe, which is yet a sign and a
source of half-conscious suggestion to those
that follow. No artist can escape the tradition
of art except by refusing to grapple with the
problem ; which is how most do escape it.
The academic humbug uses the old language
to say nothing, the bombastic charlatan de-
vises a new one for the same purpose ; but
once a man has something to express, and the
passion to express it, he will find himself at-
tacking the eternal problem and leaning on the
inevitable tradition. Let anyone who doubts
this mention quickly the name of some artist
who owes nothing to his predecessors.

Often, however, owing either to some

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

change in circumstances or to his innate
peculiarity, a man of uncommon force and
imagination will find himself with something
to say for which the traditional instrument is,
or at first seems to be, inadequate. What
shall he do ? Why, what Giotto did, what
Masaccio did, what Ronsard and the poets
of the Pleiade did, what Wordsworth did,
and what Cezanne has done. All these great
artists struck new veins, and to work them were
obliged to overhaul the tool-chest. Of the
traditional instruments some they reshaped and
resharpened, some they twisted out of recogni-
tion, a few they discarded, many they retained.
Above all, they travelled back along the tradi-
tion, tapping it and drawing inspiration from
it, nearer to its source. Very rarely does the
pioneer himself work out his seam : he leaves
it to successors along with his technical dis-
coveries. These they develop, themselves
making experiments as they go forward, 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 rise. Such is the shape of a movement.
A master, whose sole business it is to express
himself, founds it incidentally, just as incident-
ally he enriches the tradition from which he
borrows ; successors exploit it ; pious great-
grand-nephews mummify and adore it. Move-
ments are nothing but the stuff of which
77

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

tradition is made. At any given moment
tradition ends in the contemporary movement ;
the capital works of any age are almost sure
to be capital examples of that movement ;
but a hundred years later, when these are
clear-set in the tradition, the movement will
have become dust and ashes — the daily bread
of historians and archaeologists.

Though lecturers still hold up the Re-
naissance as an example of the happy and
stagnant state of the arts in a golden age when
rebels were unknown, their pupils are aware
that Giotto, the father of Renaissance painting,
broke with the maniera greca at least as sharply
as Cezanne did with the nineteenth-century
convention ; that in the art of the fifteenth
century we have a revolt against Giottesque
which must grievously have wounded many
pious souls ; and that Raphael himself stood,
in his day, for a new movement. But distance
gives a sense of proportion. We see the art
of the Italian Renaissance whole, growing out
of Byzantine and into French. The continuity
is patent ; and, what is much to my purpose,
it is Giotto and his successors rather than the
artists of the Palaeologi who seem to us to carry
on the Byzantine tradition, while the heirs of
the Renaissance are not Salvator Rosa and
Carlo Dolci, but Claude and Poussin. The
great artists stand out and join hands : the con-
tests that clashed around them, the little men
78

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

that aped them, the littler that abused, have
fallen into one ruin. The odd thing is that,
as often as not, the big men themselves have
believed that it was the tradition, and not the
stupid insensibility of their fellows, that
thwarted them. They have made the mistake
their enemies made infallibly : they have taken
a dead movement for a live tradition. For
movements die ; that is one of the respects
in which they differ most significantly from
the tradition. The movement is a vein which
is worked out ; the tradition a live thing that
changes, grows, and persists. The artist with
a new vision comes on the tradition at its near
end, and finds its implements lying in a heap
mixed with the fashions of the moribund
movement. He chooses ; he changes ; what
happens next will depend a good deal on the
state of public opinion. Should the artist have
the luck to be born in a sensitive age and an
intelligent country his innovations may be
accepted without undue hubbub. In that case
he will realize that artists can no more dispense
with the tradition than tradition can exist
without artists, and will probably come to feel
an almost exaggerated reverence for the monu-
ments of the past. But should the public be
dull and brutish, and hardening the dust of
dead movements into what it is pleased to call
" tradition," pelt with that word the thing
which above all others is to dull brutes dis-
79

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

quieting — I mean passionate conviction — the
artist, finding himself assailed in the name of
tradition, will probably reply, " Damn the
tradition." He will protest. And, for an
artist, to become a protestant is even worse
than using bad language.

Only in France, so far as I know, are the
men who are working out the heritage of
Cezanne allowed to be artists and expected to
be nothing more. Elsewhere, the public by
its uncritical attitude seems to encourage them
to pose as supermen or to become rebels.
Assuredly I am not advocating that slightly
fatuous open-mindedness which led some Ger-
mans to seize on the movement before it was
well grown and deal with it as they have dealt
with so many others, collecting its artists as
though they were beetles, bottling them, setting
them, cataloguing them, making no mistake
about them, and arranging them neatly in
museums for the dust to settle on. Organized
alertness of that sort is only less depressing
than the smartness of those Italians who
pounced so promptly on the journalistic possi-
bilities of the movement as a means of self-
advertisement. All I ask for in the public
is a little more intelligence and sensibility,
and a more critical attitude. Surely, by now,
it should be impossible to hear what I heard
only the other day — Mr. Charles Shannon
being extolled, to humiliate some enterprising
80

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

student, as a " traditional artist." Why, it
would be as sensible to call the man who makes
nest-eggs a traditional Buff Orpington 1 And
ought it still to be possible for a cultivated
dealer, because I had refused to admire a stale
old crust by some young New English painter,
who, to be in the movement, had misshaped a
few conventionally drawn objects and put black
lines round others — for a dealer, I say, who
dabbles in culture to exclaim indignantly, as
one did to me not long ago, " I can't think why
you don't like it : it's Post-Impressionist, isn't
it ? "

If we cannot lose this habit of calling artists
names, at least let us know exactly what we
mean by them. By associating artists with
movements and counter-movements we en-
courage the superstition that in art there is
some important distinction besides the distinc-
tion between good art and bad. There is not.
Such distinctions as can be drawn between the
genuine artists of one age and another, between
traditional artists and eccentrics, though service-
able to historians and archaeologists, are pitfalls
for critics and amateurs. To him who can
help us better to appreciate works of art let
us be duly grateful : to him who, from their
extraneous qualities, can deduce amusing theo-
ries or pleasant fancies we will listen when
we have time : but to him who would persuade
us that their value can in any way depend on
81 F

TRADITION AND MOVEMENTS

some non-aesthetic quality we must be positively
rude. Now, if we are to get rid of those mis-
leading labels from which works of art are sup-
posed to derive a value over and above their
aesthetic value, the first to go should be those
arch-deceivers, " traditional " and " revolu-
tionary." Let us understand that tradition
is nothing but the essence, congealed and pre-
served for us by the masters in their works,
of innumerable movements ; and that move-
ments are mere phases of the tradition from
which they spring and in which they are
swallowed up. We shall then be armed, on
the one hand, against the solemn bore who re-
quires us to admire his imitation of an old
master because it is in the tradition ; on the
other, against the portentous " 1st," whose
parthenogenetic masterpiece we are not in a
state to relish till we have sucked down the
pseudo-philosophic bolus that embodies his
eponymous " Ism." To each we shall make
the same reply : " Be so good as to remove
your irrelevant label and we will endeavour to
judge your work on its merits."

82

PICASSO

(Collection Paul Rosenberg]

MATISSE AND PICASSO

The names go together, as do those of
Shelley and Keats or Fortnum and Mason.
Even to people who seldom or never look
seriously at a picture they have stood, these
ten years, as symbols of modernity. They
are pre-eminent ; and for this there is
reason. Matisse and Picasso are the two im-
mediate heirs to Cezanne. They are in the
direct line ; and through one of them a great
part of the younger generation comes at its
share of the patrimony. To their contem-
poraries they owe nothing : they came into
the legacy and had to make what they could of
it. They are the elder brothers of the move-
ment, a fact which the movement occasionally
resents by treating them as though they were
its elder sisters.

Even to each other they owe nothing.
Matisse, to be sure, swept for one moment
out of his course by the overwhelming signifi-
cance of Picasso's early abstract work, himself
made a move in that direction. But this
adventure he quickly, and wisely, abandoned ;
the problems of Cubism could have helped
him nothing to materialize his peculiar sensi-
bility. And this sensibility — this peculiar emo-
tional reaction to what he sees — is his great
gift. No one ever felt for the visible universe
just what Matisse feels ; or, if one did, he
could not create an equivalent. Because, in
83

MATISSE AND PICASSO

addition to this magic power of creation,
Matisse has been blest with extraordinary
sensibility both of reaction and touch, he is a
great artist ; because he trusts to it entirely he
is not what for a moment apparently he wished
to be — a chef d'ecole.

Picasso, on the other hand, who never tried
to be anything of the sort, is the paramount
influence in modern painting — subject, of
course, to the supreme influence of Cezanne.
All the world over are students and young
painters to whom his mere name is thrilling ;
to whom Picasso is the liberator. His in-
fluence is ubiquitous : even in England it is
immense. Not only those who, for all their
denials — denials that spring rather from ig-
norance than bad faith — owe almost all they
have to the inventor of Cubism, but artists who
float so far out of the main stream as the
Spensers and the Nashes, Mr. Lamb and Mr.
John, would all have painted differently had
Picasso never existed.

Picasso is a born chef d'ecole. His is one of
the most inventive minds in Europe. In-
vention is as clearly his supreme gift as sensi-
bility is that of Matisse. His career has been
a series of discoveries, each of which he has
rapidly developed. A highly original and ex-
tremely happy conception enters his head,
suggested, probably, by some odd thing he
has seen. Forthwith he sets himself to analyze
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MATISSE AND PICASSO

it and disentangle those principles that account
for its peculiar happiness. He proceeds by
experiment, applying his hypothesis in the
most unlikely places. The significant elements
of negro sculpture are found to repeat their
success in the drawing of a lemon. Before
long he has established what looks like an
infallible method for producing an effect of
which, a few months earlier, no one had so
much as dreamed. This is one reason why
Picasso is a born chef d'ecole. And this is why
of each new phase in his art the earlier examples
are apt to be the more vital and well-nourished.
At the end he is approaching that formula to-
wards which his intellectual effort tends in-
evitably. It is time for a new discovery.

Meanwhile a pack of hungry followers has
been eyeing the young master as he made
clearer and ever clearer the nature of his last.
To this pack he throws hint after hint. And
still the wolves pursue. You see them in
knots and clusters all along the road he has
travelled, gnawing, tugging at some unpicked
idea. Worry ! worry ! worry ! Here is a
crowd of old laggards still lingering and
snuffling over " the blue period." A vaster
concourse is scattered about the spot where
the nigger's head fell, and of these the strongest
have carried off scraps for themselves, which
they assimilate at leisure, lying apart ; while
round the trunk of Cubism is a veritable sea of

85

MATISSE AND PICASSO

swaying, struggling, ravenous creatures. The
howling is terrific. But Picasso himself is al-
ready far away elaborating an idea that came
to him one day as he contemplated a drawing by
Ingres.

And, besides being extraordinarily inventive,
Picasso is what they call " an intellectual artist."
Those who suppose that an intellectual artist
is one who spends his time on his head mistake.
Milton and Mantegna were intellectual artists :
it may be doubted whether Caravaggio and
Rostand were artists at all. 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 think. Ob-
viously Picasso has a passionate sense of the
significance of form ; also, he can stand away
from his passion and consider it ; apparently
in this detached mood it is that he works.
In art the motive power is heat always ; some
drive their engines by means of boiling emo-
tion, others by the incandescence of intellectual
passion. These go forward by intense con-
centration on the problem ; those swing with
breathless precision from feeling to feeling.
Sophocles, Masaccio, and Bach are intellectuals
in this sense, while Shakespeare, Correggio,
and Mozart trust their sensibility almost as a
bird trusts its instinct. It never entered the
head of a swallow to criticize its own methods ;
and if Mozart could not write a tune wrong,
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MATISSE AND PICASSO

that was not because he had first tested his
idea at every point, but because he was Mozart.
Yet no one ever thought of going to a swallow
for lessons in aviation ; or, rather, Daedalus did,
and we all know what came of it.

That is my point. I do not presume to
judge between one method of creation and
another ; I shall not judge between Matisse
and Picasso ; but I do say that, as a rule, it is
the intellectual artist who becomes, in spite of
himself, schoolmaster to the rest. And there
is a reason for this. By expressing themselves
intellectual artists appeal to us aesthetically ;
but, in addition, by making, or seeming to
make, some statement about the nature of
the artistic problem they set us thinking. We
feel sure they have something to say about the
very stuff of art which we, clumsily enough,
can grasp intellectually. With purely aesthetic
qualities the intellect can do nothing : but
here, it seems, is something the brain can get
hold of. Therefore we study them and they
become our leaders ; which does not make
them our greatest artists. Matisse may yet be
a better painter than Picasso.

Be that as it may, from Matisse there is
little or nothing to be learned, since Matisse
relies on his peculiar sensibility to bring him
through. If you want to paint like him, feel
what he feels, conduct it to the tips of your
fingers, thence on to your canvas, and there
8?

MATISSE AND PICASSO

you are. The counsel is not encouraging.
These airy creatures try us too high. Indeed,
it sometimes strikes me that even to appreciate
them you must have a touch of their sensibility.
A critic who is apt to be sensible was com-
plaining the other day that Matisse had only
one instrument in his orchestra. There are
orchestras in which fifty instruments sound as
one. Only it takes a musician to appreciate
them. Also, one hears the others talking about
" the pretty, tinkley stuff " of Mozart. Those
who call the art of Matisse slight must either
be insensitive or know little of it. Certainly
Matisse is capable of recording, with an exqui-
site gesture and not much more, just the smell
of something that looked as though it would
be good to eat. These are notes. Notes are
often slight — I make the critics a present of
that. Also of this : 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
ones.

In the Plutarchian method there was ever
a snare, and I have come near treading in it.
The difference between Matisse and Picasso
is not to be stated in those sharp antitheses that
every journalist loves. Nothing could be more
obtuse than to represent one as all feeling
and the other all thought. The art of Picasso,
as a matter of fact, is perhaps more personal
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MATISSE AND PICASSO

even than that of Matisse, just because his
sensibility is perhaps even more curious.
Look at a Cubist picture by him amongst other
Cubists. Here, if anywhere, amongst these
abstractions you would have supposed that
there was small room for idiosyncrasy. Yet at
M. Leonce Rosenberg's gallery no amateur
fails to spot the Picassos. His choice of
colours, the appropriateness of his most as-
tonishing audacities, the disconcerting yet de-
lightful perfection of his taste, the unlooked-
for yet positive beauty of his harmonies make
Picasso one of the most personal artists alive.

And if Picasso is anything but a dry doc-
trinaire, Matisse is no singing bird with one
little jet of spontaneous melody. I wish his
sculpture were better known in England, for it
disposes finely of the ridiculous notion that
Matisse is a temperament without a head.
Amongst his bronze and plaster figures you
will find sometimes a series consisting of several
versions of the same subject, in which the
original superabundant conception has been re-
duced to bare essentials by a process which im-
plies the severest intellectual effort. Nothing
that Matisse has done gives a stronger sense
of his genius, and, at the same time, makes
one so sharply aware of a brilliant intelligence
and of erudition even.

Amongst the hundred differences between
Matisse and Picasso perhaps, after all, there
89

MATISSE AND PICASSO

is but one on which a critic can usefully insist.
Even about that he can say little that is definite.
Only, it does appear to be true that whereas
Matisse is a pure artist, Picasso is an artist and
something more — an involuntary ^preacher if
you like. Neither, of course, falls into the
habit of puffing out his pictures with literary
stuff, though Picasso has, on occasions, allowed
to filter into his art a, to me, most distasteful
dash of sentimentality. That is not the point,
however. The point is that whereas both
create without commenting on life, Picasso,
by some inexplicable quality in his statement,
does unmistakably comment on art. That is
why he, and not Matisse, is master of the
modern movement.

90

THE PLACE OF ART IN ART
CRITICISM

The knowing ones — those, I mean, who are
always invited to music after tea, and often
to supper after the ballet — seem now to agree
that in art significant form is the thing. You
are not to suppose that, in saying this, I am
trying to make out that all these distinguished,
or soon to he distinguished, people have been
reading my book. On the contrary, I have
the solidest grounds for believing that very
few of them have done that ; and those that
have treat me no better than they treated
Hegel. For, just as an Hegelian is not so
much a follower of that philosopher as an
expounder, one who has an interpretation of
his own, and can tell you what Hegel would
have said if Hegel had been endowed by The
Absolute with the power of saying anything,
so of those admirable people who agree, for the
moment, that significant form is what matters,
no two are quite agreed as to what significant
form is.

Only as to what it is not is there complete
unanimity ; though there is a tendency to come
together on one or two positive points. It is
years since I met anyone, careful of his reputa-
tion, so bold as to deny that the literary and
anecdotic content of a work of visual art, how-
ever charming and lively it might be, was mere
surplusage. The significance of a picture, ac-

ART IN ART CRITICISM

cording to the cognoscenti, must be implicit in
its forms ; its essential quality is something
which appeals directly to the sensibility of any
sensitive person ; and any reference to life,
to be of consequence, must be a reference to
that fundamental experience which is the com-
mon heritage of mankind. Thus, 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 formal. They will recognize,
for instance, the tragedy of Michael Angelo,
the gaiety of Fra Angelico, the lyricism of
Correggio, the gravity of Poussin, and the
romance of Giorgione. They recognize them
as pertaining, not to the subjects chosen, but
to the mind and character of the artist. Such
manifestations in line and colour of personality
they admit as relevant ; but they are quite clear
that the gossip of Frith and the touching prattle
of Sir Luke Fildes are nothing to the purpose.

And so we get a school of lenient criticism
which takes account of an appeal to life, pro-
vided that appeal be to universal experience
and be made by purely aesthetic means. Ac>
cording to this theory we can be moved aestheti-
cally by references to universal experience im-
plicit in certain arrangements of line and colour,
always provided that surh references are ex-
pressions of the artist's peculiar Demotion,, and
not mere comments on life and history or

ART IN ART CRITICISM

statements of fact or opinion. These by every-
one are deemed unessential. 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 aesthetic import
which, escaping the subtlest and most sensitive
artist, is revealed to the expert hagiographer :
neither does anyone still believe that to appre-
ciate Sung painting one must make oneself s re^
familiar with the later developments of Buddhist
metaphysics as modified by Taoist mysticism.

Such is the prevailing critical theory. What
of critical practice ? It seems to me that even
our best come something short of their profes-
sions ; 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 confreres seriously. Lately we have
seen a hot dispute in which, unless I mistake,
both these gentlemen took a hand, raging round
a figure of Christ by Mr. Epstein. For me the
only interesting fact that emerged from this
controversy was that, apparently, most of the
disputants had not so much as heard of the
greatest living sculptor — I mean Maillol, of
course. Certainly, with the art of Maillol
clearly in his mind, it is inconceivable that one
so discriminating as the critic of the Nation
should have said, as I think he did say, that Mr.
Epstein now stands for European sculpture as
93

ART IN ART CRITICISM

Rodin stood before him. Not only is Maillol
quite (ibvjous)y superior to Mr. Epstein ; in
the opinion of many he is a better artist than
Rodin.

But it was not around such questions as
these, vexatious, no doubt, but pertinent, that
controversy raged. The questions that emi-
nent critics, writers, and dignitaries of divers
churches discussed in public, while colonels,
Socialists, and cultivated theosophical ladies
wrangled over them at home, were : " Has Mr.
Epstein done justice to the character of
Christ ? " and, " What was His character ? "
Was Christ intelligent or was He something
nobler, and what has Mr. Epstein to say about
it ? Was He disdainful or was He sympathetic ?
Was He like Mr. Bertrand Russell or more like
Mr. Gladstone ? And did Mr. Epstein see
Him with the eyes of one who knew what for
ages Christ had meant to Europe, or with those
of a Jew of the first century ? Questions such
as these — I will not swear to any particular one
of them — were what the critics threw into the
arena, and no one much blames the parsons and
publicists for playing football with them. But
the critics must have known that such ques-
tions were utterly irrelevant ; that it mattered
not a straw whether this statue, considered as a
work of art, represented Jesus Christ or John
Smith.

This the critics knew : they knew that the
94

ART IN ART CRITICISM

appeal of a work of art is essentially permanent
and universal, and they knew that hardly one
word in their controversy could have meant
anything to the most sensitive Chinaman alive,
unless he happened to be familiar with the
Christian tradition and Christian ethics. If
there be no more in Mr. Epstein's figure than
what the critics talked about, then, should the
Christian religion ever become obsolete and
half-forgotten, Mr. Epstein's figure will be-
come quite insignificant. Most of us know
next to nothing about Buddhism and Totemism,
and only a little about Greek myths and Byzan-
tine theology, yet works of art historically
associated with these remain, by reason of their
permanent and universal, that is to say their
purely aesthetic, qualities, as moving and in-
telligible as on the day they left their makers'
hands. About Mr. Epstein's sculpture the
important thing to discover is whether, and
in what degree, it possesses these permanent
and universal qualities. But on that subject
the critics are dumb.

An instructive parallel in literary journalism
occurs to me. I have noticed lately a tendency
in the intellectual underworld — for here I take
leave of first-class criticism — to belittle Ibsen,
with the object, apparently, of magnifying
Tchekov, and always it is in the name of art
that Ibsen is decried. Now, if our literary
ragamuffins cared twopence about art they

95

ART IN ART CRITICISM

would all be on their knees before Ibsen, who
is, I suppose, the finest dramatic artist since
Racine. Few things are more perfect as form,
more admirably consistent and self-supporting,
than his later plays. It was he who invented
the modern dramatic method of seizing a
situation at the point at which it can last be
seized, and from there pushing it forward with
imperturbable logic and not one divagation.
As an artist Ibsen is to a considerable extent
the master of Tchehov ; imt, as art is the last
thing to which an English Intellectual pays
attention, this fact has been overlooked. What
our latter~day mtellectuals take an interest in
is what interested their grandmothers — morals.
They prefer Tchehov's point of view to that of
Ibsen, and so do I. They are vexed by the
teaching implicit in Ibsen's tendencious plays ;
so am I. Yet when I ask myself: " Is Ibsen's
moralizing worse than anyone else's ? " I am
forced to admit that it is not. Th.e fact is all
moralizing is tedious, and is recognized as such
by everyone the moment it becomes a little
stale. Another generation, with other ideals,
will be as much irritated by Tchehov's ill-
concealed propaganda as our generation is by
Ibsen's, and as Ibsen's was by Tennyson's.
Depend upon it : by those young people in the
next generation but one who talk loudest, wear
the worst clothes, and are most earnest about
life and least sensitive to art, Tchehov will be

ART IN ART CRITICISM

voted a bore. What is more, it will be in the
name of art that they will cry him down.

Every now and then we hear eloquent ap-
peals to the appropriate authorities, praying
them to add to their school of journalism a
department of art criticism. I hope and believe
the appropriate authorities will do no such
thing. Should, however, their sense of eco-
nomy be insufficient to restrain them from
paying this last insult to art, they will still find
me waiting for them with a practical sugges-
tion. Any student proposing to educate him-
self as a critic should be compelled to devote
the first years of his course to the criticism of
non-representative art. Set down to criticize
buildings, furniture, textiles, and ceramics, he
will find himself obliged to explore the depths
of his own aesthetic experience. To explain
honestly and precisely why he prefers this chair
to that requires, he will find, a far more intense
effort of the intellect and imagination than any
amount of fine writing about portraits and
landscape. It will force him to take account
of his purely aesthetic emotions and to discover
what exactly provokes them. He will be
driven into that world of minute differences
and subtle reactions which is the world of a
\4nd until he knows his way about that world
he would do well to express no opinion on the
merits of pictures and statues.

97 G

BONNARD*

In France, where even amateurs of painting
enjoy a bit of rhetoric, 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 Derain," etc. Also, so
cosmopolitan is Paris, there were those who
would put in the query : " Et Picasso ? " but,
as no Frenchman much cares to be reminded
that the man who, since Cezanne, has had the
greatest effect on painting is a Spaniard, this
interjection was generally ill-received. On the
other hand, those who queried : " Et Bonnard ? "
got a sympathetic hearing always.

M. Leon Werth deals neither in rhetoric nor
in orders of merit. Bonnard is his theme ;
and on Bonnard he has written thirty-six pages
without, I think, pronouncing the name of one
.rival, leaving to his readers the agreeable task
of putting the right heads in the way of such
blows as he occasionally lets fly. Of Bonnard
he has written with a delicacy of understanding
hardly to be matched in contemporary criticism.
He has sketched exquisitely a temperament,
and if he has not told us much about its fruits,
about the pictures of Bonnard that is to say,
he can always refer us to the series of repro-
ductions at the end of the volume.

* Bonnard. Par Leon Werth. Paris : Cres. 40 fr.
98

BONNARD

(Photo: E. Druet)

BONNARD

What M. Werth would say to the distinc-
tion implied in my last paragraph I cannot tell ;
but I am sure it is important. Certainly, be-
hind every work of art lies a temperament, a
mind ; and it is this mind that creates, that
causes and conditions the forms and colours
of which a picture consists ; nevertheless, what
we see are forms and colours, forms and colours
are what move us. Doubtless, M. Werth is
right in thinking that Bonnard paints beauti-
fully because he loves what he paints ; but what
Bonnard gives us is something more significant
than his feeling for cups or cats or human
beings. He gives us created form with a
significance of its own, to the making of which
went his passion and its object, but which is
something quite distinct from both. He gives
us a work of art.

To consider a picture by Vuillard, whose
work is often compared with that of Bonnard,
might help us here. Vuillard loves what he
paints, and his pictures are attractive, as often
as not, chiefly because they represent lovely
things. A picture by Bonnard, for all its
fascinating overtones, has a life entirely of its
own. It is like a flower, which is beautiful
not because it represents, or reminds one of,
something beautiful, but because it is beautiful.
A picture by Bonnard escapes from its sub-
ject, and from its author, too. And this is all-
important because it is just this independent
99

BONNARD

life of its own that gives to a work of art its
peculiar character and power. Unluckily,
about this detached life, about a work of art
considered as a work of art, there is little or
nothing to be said ; so perhaps M. Werth
has done well to confine himself to the task of
giving his readers a taste of the quality of an
artist's mind. This task was difficult enough
in all conscience ; the mind of Bonnard is
subtle, delicate, and creative, and it has needed
subtlety, delicacy, and not a little creative
power, to give us even a glimpse of it.

The first thing one gets from a picture by
Bonnard is a sense of perplexed, delicious
colour : tones of miraculous subtlety seem to
be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing
one another there. From this pool emerge
gradually forms which appear sometimes vapor-
ous and sometimes tentative, but never vapid
and never woolly. When we have realized
that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design
of extraordinary originality and perfect cohe-
rence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height.
And not until this excitement begins to flag
do we notice that the picture carries a delight-
ful overtone — that it is witty, whimsical,
fantastic.

Such epithets one uses because they are the

best that language affords, hoping that they

will not create a false impression. They are

literary terms, and the painting of Bonnard is

100

BONNARD

never literary. Whatever, by way of over-
tone, he may reveal of himself is implicit in his
forms : symbolism and caricature are not in
his way. You may catch him murmuring to
himself, " That's a funny-looking face " ; he
will never say " That's the face of a man whom
I expect you to laugh at." If you choose to
take his Apr£s-Midi Bourgeoise (which is not
reproduced here) as a sly comment on family
life you may : but anyone who goes to it for the
sort of criticism he would find in the plays of
Mr. Shaw or Mr. Barker is, I am happy to say,
doomed to disappointment. What amused
Bonnard was not the implication, social, moral,
or political, of the scene, but the scene itself
— the look of the thing. Bonnard never strays
outside the world of visual art. He finds
significance in the appearance of things and
converts it into form and colour. With the
pompous symbolism of the grand-mannerist,
or the smart symbolism of the caricaturist,
or the half-baked symbolism of the pseudo-
philosophical-futuro-dynamitard he has no
truck whatever. His ambition is not to con-
vey, without the aid of words, certain elemen-
tary ideas, unimportant facts, or obvious senti-
ments, but to create forms that shall corres-
pond with his intimate sense of the significance
of things. The paraphernalia of symbolism are
nothing to his purpose : what he requires are
subtlety of apprehension and lightness of
101

BONNARD

touch, and these are what he has. So M. Le*on
Werth meets people who complain that " Bon-
nard manque de noblesse."

Bonnard is not noble. A kitten jumping on
to the table moves him, not because he sees in
that gesture a symbol of human aspiration or of
feminine instability, the spirit of youth or the
pathos of the brute creation, nor yet because
it reminds him of pretty things, but because
the sight is charming. He will never be appre-
ciated by people who want something from art
that is not art. But to those who care for the
thing itself his work is peculiarly sympathetic,
because it is so thoroughly, so unmitigatedly
that of an artist ; and therefore it does not sur-
prise me that some of them should see in him
the appropriate successor to Renoir. Like
Renoir, he loves life as he finds it. He, too,
enjoys intensely those good, familiar things
that perhaps only artists can enjoy to the full —
sunshine and flowers, white tables spread be-
neath trees, fruits, crockery, leafage, the move-
ments of young animals, the grace of girls
and the amplitude of fat women. Also, he
loves intimacy. He is profoundly French.
He reminds one sometimes of Rameau and
sometimes of Ravel, sometimes of Lafontaine
and sometimes of Laforgue.

Renoir never reminded anyone of Ravel or
Laforgue. Renoir and Bonnard are not so
much alike after all. In fact, both as artists

102

BONNARD

and craftsmen they are extremely different.
Renoir's output was enormous ; he painted
with the vast ease of a lyrical giant. His
selections and decisions were instinctive and
immediate. He trusted his reactions im-
plicitly. Also, there is nothing that could
possibly be called whimsical, nothing critical
or self-critical, about him. Bonnard, on the
other hand, must be one of the most pains-
taking artists alive. He comes at beauty by
tortuous ways, artful devices, and elaboration.
He allows his vision to dawn on you by degrees :
no one ever guesses at first sight how serious,
how deliberately worked out his compositions
are.

There is something Chinese about him ;
and he is one of those rare Europeans who
have dealt in " imposed " rather than " built-
up " design. Bonnard's pictures grow not as
trees ; they float as water-lilies. European
pictures, as a rule, spring upwards, masonry-
wise, from their foundations ; the design of a
picture by Bonnard, like that of many Chinese
pictures and Persian textiles, seems to have been
laid on the canvas as one might lay cautiously
on dry grass some infinitely precious figured
gauze. Assuredly, the hand that lets fall
these beauties is as unlike that which, even in
the throes of rheumatism, affirmed with
supreme confidence the mastery of Renoir, as
the easy accessibility of our last old master
103

BONNARD

is unlike this shy, fastidious spirit that M. L6on
Werth, by a brilliant stroke of sympathetic
intelligence, has contrived to catch and hold
for an instant.

104

DUNCAN GRANT

To-day,* when the Carfax Gallery opens its
doors at No. 5 Bond Street, and invites the
cultivated public to look at the paintings of
Duncan Grant, 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 seriously. Nothing
of the sort has happened since the time of
Constable ; so naturally one is excited.

If the public knows little of Duncan Grant
the public is not to blame. During the fifteen
years that he has been at work not once has he
held " a one-man show," while his sendings to
periodic exhibitions have been rare and un-
obtrusive. To be sure, there is a picture by
him in the Tate Gallery. But who ever thought
of going there to look for a work of art ?
Besides, during the last few years the Tate,
like most other places of the sort, has been
given over to civil servants. Duncan Grant
is a scrupulous, slow, and not particularly
methodical worker. His output is small ; 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 sell.
Apparently he cares little for fame ; so the
public gets few opportunities of coming ac-
quainted with his work.

* February 6, 1920.
105

DUNCAN GRANT

Duncan Grant is the best English painter
alive. And how English he is! (British, I
should say, for he is a Highlander.) Of
course, he has been influenced by Cezanne
and the modern Frenchmen. He is of the
movement. Superficially his work may look
exotic and odd. Odd it will certainly look
to people unfamiliar with painting. But
anyone who has studied and understood the
Italians will see at a glance that Duncan Grant
is thoroughly in the great tradition ; while he
who also knows the work of Wilson, Gains-
borough, Crome, Cotman, Constable, and
Turner will either deny that there is such a
thing as an English tradition or admit that
Duncan Grant is in it. For my part, I am
inclined to believe that an English pictorial
tradition exists, though assuredly it is a tiny
and almost imperceptible rill, to be traced as
often, perhaps, through English poetry as
through English painting. At all events,
there are national characteristics ; and these
you will find asserting themselves for good or
ill in the work of our better painters.

Duncan Grant's ancestors are Piero della
Francesca, Gainsborough, and the Elizabethan
poets. There is something Greek about him,
too ; not the archaeological Greek of Germany,
nor yet the Graeco-Roman academicism of
France, but rather that romantic, sensuous
Hellenism of the English literary tradition.
106

DUNCAN GRANT

It is, perhaps, most obvious in his early work,
where, indeed, all the influences I have named
can easily be found. Then, at the right
moment, he plunged headlong into the move-
ment, became the student of Cezanne, Matisse,
Picasso, though not, curiously enough, of
Bonnard, the modern artist with whose work
his own has the closest affinity, and, for a year
or two, suffered his personality to disappear
almost beneath the heavy, fertilizing spate.
He painted French exercises. He was learn-
ing. He has learnt. He can now express,
not someone else's ideas, but himself, com-
pletely and with delicious ease, in the language
of his age. He is a finished and highly personal
modern artist.

I dare say Duncan Grant's most national
characteristic is the ease with which he achieves
beauty. To paint beautifully comes as natur-
ally to him as to speak English does to me.
Almost all English artists of any merit have
had this gift, and most of them have turned
it to sorry account. It was so pleasant to
please that they tried to do nothing else, so easy
to do it that they scampered and gambolled
down the hill that ends in mere prettiness.
From this catastrophe Duncan Grant has been
saved by a gift which, amongst British painters,
is far from common. He is extremely in-
telligent. His intellect is strong enough to
keep in hand that most charming and unruly
107

DUNCAN GRANT

of its sister gifts, sensibility. And a painter
who possesses both sensibility and the intellect
to direct it is in a fair way to becoming a master.
The sensibility of English artists, whether
verbal or visual, is as notorious as their sense
of beauty. This becomes less surprising when
we reflect that the former includes the latter.
The fact is, critics, with their habitual slovenli-
ness, apply the term " sensibility " to two
different things. Sometimes they are talking
about the artist's imagination, and sometimes
about his use of the instrument : sometimes
about his reactions, and sometimes — in the
case of painters — about the tips of his fingers.
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 " sensibility." But,
though both are consequences of this peculiar
delicacy and what I should like to call " light-
triggeredness " of temperament, they are by no
means identical. By " sensibility " critics may
mean an artist's power of responding easily and
intensely to the aesthetic significance of what
he sees ; this power they might call, if they
cared to be precise, " sensibility of inspiration."
At other times they imply no more than sensi-
bility of touch : in which case they mean that
the contact between the artist's brush and his
canvas has the quality of a thrilling caress,
so that it seems almost as if the instrument
108

DUNCAN GRANT

that bridged the gulf between his fingers and
the surface of his picture must have been as
much alive as himself. " Sensibility of hand-
ling " or " hand-writing " is the proper name
for this. In a word, there is sensibility of the
imagination and sensibility of the senses : one
is receptive, the other executive. Now, Dun-
can Grant's reactions before the visible uni-
verse are exquisitely vivid and personal, and
the quality of his paint is often as charming as a
kiss. He is an artist who possesses both kinds
of sensibility. These are adorable gifts ; but
they are not extraordinarily rare amongst Eng-
lish painters of the better sort.

In my judgement Gainsborough and Duncan
Grant are the English painters who have been
most splendidly endowed with sensibility of
both sorts, but I could name a dozen who have
been handsomely supplied. In my own time
there have been four — Burne-Jones (you should
look at his early work), Conder, Steer, and John,
all of whom had an allowance far above the
average, while in America there was Whistler.
No one, I suppose, would claim for any of
these, save, perhaps, Whistler, a place even in
the second rank of artists. From which it
follows clearly that something more than
delicacy of reaction and touch is needed to
make a man first-rate. What is needed is, of
course, constructive power. An artist must
be able to convert his inspiration into signifi-
109

DUNCAN GRANT

cant form ; for in art it is not from a word to a
blow, but from a tremulous, excited vision to an
orderly mental conception, and from that con-
ception, by means of the problem and with the
help of technique, to externalization in form.
That is where intelligence and creative power
come in. And no British painter has, as yet,
combined with sure and abundant sensibility
power and intelligence of a sort to do perfectly,
and without fail, this desperate and exacting
work. In other words, there has been no
British painter of the first magnitude. But I
mistake, or Gainsborough, Crome, Constable,
and Duncan Grant were all born with the
possibility of greatness in them.

Many British (or, to make myself safe, I will
say English-speaking) painters have had enough
sensibility of inspiration to make them dis-
tinguished and romantic figures. Who but
feels that Wilson, Blake, Reynolds, Turner,
and Rossetti were remarkable men ? Others
have had that facility and exquisiteness of
handling which gives us the enviable and almost
inexhaustible producer of charming objects —
Hogarth, Cotman, Keene, Whistler, Conder,
Steer, Davies. Indeed, with the exceptions of
Blake and Rossetti — two heavy-handed men of
genius — and Reynolds, whose reactions were
something too perfunctory, I question whether
there be a man in either list who wanted
much for sensibility of either sort. But what
no

DUNCAN GRANT

English painter could conceive and effectively
carry out a work of art ? Crome, I think, has
done it ; Gainsborough and Constable at any
rate came near ; 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 exhibi-
tion.

An Englishman who is an artist can hardly
help being a poet ; I neither applaud nor al-
together deplore the fact, though certainly it
has been the ruin of many promising painters.
The doom of Englishmen is not reversed for
Duncan Grant : he is a poet ; but he is a poet
in the right way — in the right way, I mean,
for a painter to be a poet. Certainly his
vision is not purely pictorial ; and because he
feels the literary significance of what he sees
his conceptions are apt to be literary. But he
does not impose his conceptions on his pictures ;
he works his pictures out of his conceptions.
Anyone who will compare them with those of
Rossetti or Watts will see in a moment what
I mean. In Duncan Grant there is, I agree,
something that reminds one unmistakably of
the Elizabethan poets, something fantastic and
whimsical and at the same time intensely lyrical.
I should find it hard to make my meaning
clearer, yet I am conscious enough that my
epithets applied to painting are anything but
precise. But though they may be lyrical or
in

DUNCAN GRANT

fantastic or witty, these pictures never tell a
story or point a moral.

My notion is that Duncan Grant often starts
from some mixed motif which, as he labours
to reduce it to form and colour, he cuts, chips,
and knocks about till you would suppose that
he must have quite whittled the alloy away.
But the fact is, the very material out of which he
builds is coloured in poetry. The thing he has
to build is a monument of pure visual art ;
that is what he plans, designs, elaborates, and
finally executes. Only, when he has achieved
it we cannot help noticing the colour of the
bricks. All notice, and some enjoy, this adsci-
titious literary overtone. Make no mistake,
however, the literary element in the art of
Duncan Grant is what has been left over, not
what has been added. A Blake or a Watts
conceives a picture and makes of it a story ; a
Giorgione or a Piero di Cosimo steals the germ
of a poem and by curious cultivation grows
out of it a picture. In the former class you
will find men who may be great figures, but
can never be more than mediocre artists :
Duncan Grant is of the latter. He is in the
English tradition without being in the English
rut. He has sensibility of inspiration, beauty
of touch, and poetry ; but, controlling these,
he has intelligence and artistic integrity. He
is extremely English ; but he is more of an
artist than an Englishman.
ill

NEGRO SCULPTURE

Already the Chelsea show of African and
Oceanian sculpture is sending the cultivated
public to the ethnographical collections in the
British Museum, just as, last autumn, the show
organized in Paris by M. Paul Guillaume filled
the Trocadero.* Fine ladies, young painters,
and exquisite amateurs are now to be seen in
those long dreary rooms that once were aban-
doned to missionaries, anthropologists, and
colonial soldiers, enhancing their prestige by
pointing out to stay-at-home cousins the relics
of a civilization they helped to destroy. For
my part I like the change. I congratulate the
galleries and admire the visitors, though the
young painters, I cannot help thinking, have
been a little slow.

Negro art was discovered — its real merit
was first recognized, I mean — some fifteen
years ago, in Paris, by the painters there.
Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and Vlaminck began
picking up such pieces as they could find in
old curiosity and pawn shops ; with Guillaume
Apollinaire, literary apostle, following apostolic-
ally at their heels. Thus a demand was created
which M. Paul Guillaume was there to meet
and stimulate. But, indeed, the part played
by that enterprising dealer is highly com-
mendable ; for the Trocadero collections being,
unlike the British, mediocre both in quantity

113

NEGRO SCULPTURE

and quality, it was he who put the most sensi-
tive public in Europe — a little cosmopolitan
group of artists, critics, and amateurs — in
the way of seeing a number of first-rate things.
Because, in the past, Negro art has been
treated with absurd contempt, we are all in-
clined now to overpraise it ; and because I
mean to keep my head I shall doubtless by
my best friends be called a fool. Judging
from the available data — no great stock, by the
way — I should say that Negro art was entitled
to a place amongst the great schools, but that
it was no match for the greatest. With the
greatest I would compare it. I would com-
pare it with the art of the supreme Chinese
periods (from Han to Sung), with archaic
Greek, with Byzantine, with Mahomedan,
which, for archaeological purposes, begins
under the Sassanians a hundred years and more
before the birth of the prophet ; I would com-
pare it with Romanesque and early Italian
(from Giotto to Raffael) ; but I would place
it below all these. On the other hand, when
I consider the whole corpus of black art known
to us, and compare it with Assyrian, Roman,
Indian, true Gothic (not Romanesque, that is
to say), or late Renaissance it seems to me
that the blacks have the best of it. And, on
the whole, I should be inclined to place West
and Central African art, at any rate, on a level
with Egyptian. Such sweeping classifications,
114

NEGRO SCULPTURE

however, are not to be taken too seriously.
All I want to say is that, though the capital
achievements of the greatest schools do seem
to me to have an absolute superiority over any-
thing Negro I have seen, yet the finest black
sculpture is so rich in artistic qualities that it is
entitled to a place beside them.

I write, thinking mainly of sculpture, be-
cause it was an exhibition of sculpture that set
me off. It should be remembered, however,
that perhaps the most perfect achievements of
these savages are to be found amongst their
textiles and basket-work. Here, their exqui-
site taste and sense of quality and their un-
surpassed gift for filling a space are seen to
greatest advantage, while their shortcomings
lie almost hid. But it is their sculpture which,
at the moment, excites us most, and by it they
may fairly be judged. Exquisiteness of quality
is its most attractive characteristic. Touch one
of these African figures and it will remind you
of the rarest Chinese porcelain. What deli-
cacy in the artist's sense of relief and modelling
is here implied 1 What tireless industry and
paitence ! Run your hand over a limb, or a
torso, or, better still, over some wooden vessel ;
there is no flaw, no break in the continuity of
the surface ; the thing is alive from end to end.
And this extraordinary sense of quality seems
to be universal amongst them. I think I
never saw a genuine nigger object that was
"5

NEGRO SCULPTURE

vulgar — except, of course, things made quite
recently under European direction. This is a
delicious virtue, but it is a precarious one. It
is precarious because it is not self-conscious :
because it has not been reached by the in-
telligent understanding of an artist, but
springs from the instinctive taste of primitive
people. I have seen an Oxfordshire labourer
work himself beautifully a handle for his hoe,
in the true spirit of a savage and an artist,
admiring and envying all the time the life-
less machine-made article hanging, out of his
reach, in the village shop. The savage gift
is precarious because it is unconscious. Once
let the black or the peasant become'acquainted
with the showy utensils of industrialism, or
with cheap, realistic painting and sculpture,
and, having no critical sense wherewith to
protect himself, he will be bowled over for a
certainty. He will admire ; he will imitate ;
he will be undone.

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 art. Savages lack self-conscious-
ness and the critical sense because they lack
intelligence. And because they lack intelli-
gence they are incapable of profound concep-
tions. Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all
are here ; but profundity of vision is not.
And because they cannot grasp complicated
116

NEGRO SCULPTURE

ideas they fail generally to create organic
wholes. One of the chief characteristics of
the very greatest artists is this power of creating
wholes which, as wholes, are of infinitely
greater value than the sum of their parts.
That, it seems to me, is what savage artists
generally fail to do.

Also, they lack originality. I do not forget
that Negro sculptors have had to work in a
very strict convention. They have been mak-
ing figures of tribal gods and fetiches, and have
been obliged meticulously to respect the
tradition. But were not European Primitives
and Buddhists similarly bound, and did they
not contrive to circumvent their doctrinal
limitations ? That the African artists seem
hardly to have attempted to conceive the figure
afresh for themselves and realize in wood a
personal vision does, I think, imply a definite
want of creative imagination . Just how serious
a defect you will hold this to be will depend
on the degree of importance you attach to
complete self-expression. Savage artists seem
to express themselves in details. You must
seek their personality in the quality of their
relief, their modulation of surface, their hand-
ling of material, and their choice of ornament.
Seek, and you will be handsomely rewarded ;
in these things the niggers have never been
surpassed. Only when you begin to look for
that passionate affirmation of a personal vision
117

NEGRO SCULPTURE

which we Europeans, at any rate, expect to
find in the greatest art will you run a risk
of being disappointed. It will be then, if ever,
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 emotions.

And now come the inevitable questions —
where were these things made, and when ?
" At different times and in different places,"
would be the most sensible reply. About
the provenance of any particular piece it is
generally possible to say something vague ;
about dates we know next to nothing. At least,
I do ; and when I consider that we have no
records and no trustworthy criteria, and that
so learned and brilliant an archaeologist as Mr.
Joyce professes ignorance, I am not much dis-
posed to believe that anyone knows more.
I am aware that certain amateurs think to en-
hance the value of their collections by confer-
ring dates on their choicer specimens ; I can
understand why dealers encourage them in this
vanity; and, seeing that they go to the col-
lectors and dealers for their information, I
suppose one ought not to be surprised when
journalists come out with their astounding
attributions. The facts are as follows.

We know that Portuguese adventurers had a
considerable influence on African art in the
sixteenth, and even in the fifteenth, century.
118

NEGRO SCULPTURE

There begins our certain knowledge. Of
work so influenced a small quantity exists. Of
earlier periods we know nothing precise.
There are oral traditions of migrations, em-
pires, and dynasties : often there is evidence
of past invasions and the supersession of one
culture by another : and that is all. The
discoveries of explorers have so far thrown
little light on archaeology ; and in most parts of
West and Central Africa it would be im-
possible even for trained archaeologists to
establish a chronological sequence such as can
be formed when objects are found buried in
the sand one above the other. But, in fact,
it is to vague traders and missionaries, rather
than to trained archaeologists, that we owe most
of our fine pieces, which, as often as not, have
been passed from hand to hand till, after many
wanderings, they reached the coast. Add to
all this the fact that most African sculpture is
in wood (except, of course, those famous pro-
ducts of early European influence, the bronze
castings from Benin), that this wood is exposed
to a devastating climate — hot and damp — to
say nothing of the still more deadly white ants,
and you will probably agree that the dealer or
amateur who betickets his prizes with such
little tags as "Gaboon, roth century" evinces
a perhaps exaggerated confidence in our gulli-
bility.

Whenever these artists may have flourished
119

NEGRO SCULPTURE

it seems they flourish no more. The produc-
tion of idols and fetiches continues, but the
production of fine art is apparently at an end.
The tradition is moribund, a misfortune one
is tempted to attribute, along with most that
have lately afflicted that unhappy continent,
to the whites. To do so, however, would not
be altogether just. Such evidence as we pos-
sess— and pretty slight it is — goes to show
that even in the uninvaded parts of West
Central Africa the arts are decadent : wherever
the modern white man has been busy they are,
of course, extinct. According to experts Negro
art already in the eighteenth century was
falling into a decline from some obscure, inter-
nal cause. Be that as it may, it was doomed
in any case. Before the bagman with his
Brummagem goods an art of this sort was
bound to go the way that in Europe our applied
arts, the art of the potter, the weaver, the builder
and the joiner, the arts that in some sort re-
sembled it, have gone. No purely instinctive
art can stand against the machine. And thus
it comes about that, at the present moment,
we have in Europe the extraordinary spectacle
of a grand efflorescence of the highly self-
conscious, self-critical, intellectual, individualis-
tic art of painting amongst the ruins of the
instinctive, uncritical, communal, and easily
impressed arts of utility. Industrialism, which,
with its vulgar finish and superabundant orna-
120

NEGRO SCULPTURE

ment, has destroyed not only popular art but
popular taste, has merely isolated the self-
conscious artist and the critical appreciator ;
and the nineteenth century (from Stephenson
to Mr. Ford), which ruined the crafts, in
painting (from Ingres to Picasso) rivals the
fifteenth.

Meanwhile, the scholarly activities of dealers
and journalists notwithstanding, there is no
such thing as nigger archaeology ; for which
let us be thankful. Here, at any rate, are no
great names to scare us into dishonest admira-
tion. Here is no question of dates and schools
to give the lecturer his chance of spoiling our
pleasure. Here is nothing to distract our
attention from the one thing that matters —
aesthetic significance. Here is nigger sculp-
ture : you may like it or dislike it, but at any
rate you have no inducement to judge it on
anything but its merits.

121

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

M. Andre" Lhote is not only a first-rate painter,
he is a capable writer as well ; so when, some
weeks ago, he began to tell us what was wrong
with modern art, and how to put it right,
naturally we pricked up our ears. We were
not disappointed. M. Lhote had several good
things to say, and he said them clearly ; the
thing, however, which he said most emphatic-
ally of all was that he, Andre Lhote, besides
being a painter and a writer, is a Frenchman.
He has a natural taste for order and a super-
stitious belief in authority. That is why he
recommends to the reverent study of the young
of all nations, David — David the Schoolmaster !
Merciy we have our own Professor Tonks.

Not that I would compare David,, who was a
first-rate practitioner and something of an
artist, with the great Agrippa of the Slade.
But from David even we have little or nothing
to learn. For one thing, art cannot be taught ;
for another, if it could be, a dry doctrinaire is
not the man to teach it. Very justly M. Lhote
compares the Bouchers and Fragonards of the
eighteenth century with the Impressionists :
alike they were charming, a little drunk and
disorderly. But when he asserts that it was
David who rescued painting from their agree-
able frivolity he must be prepared for con-
tradiction : some people will have it that it
122

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

was rather the pupil Ingres. David, they will
say, was little better than a politic pedagogue,
who, observing that with the Revolution
classical virtues and classical costumes had
come into fashion, that Brutus, the tyrannicide,
and Aristides, called " the just," were the
heroes of the hour, suited his manners to his
company and gave the public an art worthy
of highly self-conscious liberals. The timely
discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii,
they will argue, stood him in good stead.
From these he learnt just how citizens and
citizen-soldiers should be drawn ; and he drew
them : with the result that the next generation
of Frenchmen were sighing,

Qui nous dfelivrera des Grecs et des Remains ?

Whoever may have rescued European paint-
ing from the charming disorder of the age of
reason, there can be no question as to who saved
it from the riot of impressionism. That was
the doing of the Post-Impressionists headed by
Cezanne. Forms and colours must be so
organized as to compose coherent and self-
supporting wholes ; that is the central con-
viction which has inspired the art of the last
twenty years. Order : that has been the watch-
word ; but order imposed from within. And
order so imposed, order imposed by the artist's
inmost sense of what a work of art should be,
is something altogether different from the order
123

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

obtained by submission to a theory of painting.
One springs from a personal conviction ; the
other is enjoined by authority. Modern artists
tend to feel strongly the necessity for the
former, and, if they be Frenchmen, to believe
intellectually in the propriety of the latter.

Look at a picture by Cezanne or by Picasso.
What could be more orderly ? Cubism is
nothing but the extreme manifestation of this
passion for order, for the complete organiza-
tion of forms and colours. The artist has
subordinated his predilections and prejudices,
his peculiar way of seeing and feeling, his
whims, his fancies and his eccentricities, to a
dominant sense of design. Yet the picture is
personal. In the first place a picture must
be an organic whole, but that whole may be
made up of anything that happens to possess
the artist's mind. Now, look at a picture by
Baudry or Poynter and you will see the last
word in painting by precept. The virtuous
apprentice has stuck to the rules. He has done
all that his teacher bade him do. And he has
done nothing else. David ought to be pleased.
Pray, M. Lhote, give him top marks.

Post-Impressionism, which reaffirmed the
artist's latent sense of order and reawoke a
passion to create objects complete in them-
selves, left the painter in full possession of his
individuality. Now individualism is the breath
of every artist's life, and a thing of which no
124

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

Frenchman, in his heart, can quite approve.
So, if an artist happens also to be a Frenchman
— and the combination is admirably common —
what is he to do ? Why, look one way and
row the other ; which is what M. Lhote does.
He paints delightfully personal and impenitent
pictures, and preaches artistic Caesarism and
David, " the saviour of society." All the week
he is a French artist, traditional as all real
artists must be, but never denying, when it
comes to practice, that tradition is merely an
indispensable means to self-expression ; and
on Sundays, I dare say, he goes, like Cezanne,
to lean on M. le Cure, who leans on Rome,
while his concierge receives the pure gospel of
Syndicalism, which, also, is based on absolute
truths, immutable, and above criticism.

It is notorious that you may with impunity
call a placable Frenchman " butor," " sceleYat,"
" coquin fieffeV' " sale chameau," " depute* "
even, or " secateur " ; but two things you
may not do : you may not call him " espece
d'individu," and you may not say " vous n'6tes
pas logique." It is as unpardonable to call a
Frenchman " illogique " as to shout after the
Venetian who has almost capsized your gon-
dola " mal educate." M. Lhote is " logique "
all right : but " logical " in France has a
peculiar meaning. It means that you accept
the consequences of your generalizations with-
out bothering about any little discrepancies
125

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

that may occur between those consequences
and the facts ascertained by experience ; it
does not mean that your high a -priori generali-
zations are themselves to be tested by the nasty,
searching instrument of reason. Thus it
comes about that the second master to whom
M. 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
Nain."

I can quite understand M. Lhote's liking
for the brothers Le Nain, because I share it.
Their simple, honest vision and frank state-
ment are peculiarly sympathetic to the genera-
tion that swears by Cezanne. Here are men
of good faith who feel things directly, and say
not a word more than they feel. With a little
ingenuity and disingenuousness one might
make a douanier of them. They are scrupu-
lous, sincere, and born painters. But they are
not orderly. They are not organizers of form
and colour. No : they are not. On the con-
trary, these good fellows had the most ele-
mentary notions of composition. 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 per-
manence and unity. They set down what they
saw, and it is a bit of good luck if what they
saw turns out to have somewhat the air of a
whole. Yet M. Lhote, preaching his crusade
126

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

against disorder, picks out the Le Nain and
sets them up as an example. What is the
meaning of this ?

M. Lhote himself supplies the answer. It
is not order so much as authority that he is
after ; and authority is good wherever found
and by whomsoever exercised. " Look," says
he, "at Le Nain's peasants. The painter re-
presents them to us in the most ordinary atti-
tude. It is the poetry of everyday duties
accepted without revolt. Le Nain's person-
ages are engaged in being independent as
little as possible." No Bolshevism here : and
what a lesson for us all ! Let painters submit
themselves lowly and reverently to David, and
seventeenth-century peasants to their feudal
superiors. Not that I have the least reason
for supposing M. Lhote to be in politics an
aristocrat : probably he is a better democrat
than I am. It is the K/oaro?, the rule, he cares
for. Do as you are told by Louis XIV, or
Lenin, or David : only be sure that it is as
you are told. M. Lhote, of course, does no-
thing of the sort. He respects the tradition,
he takes tips from Watteau or Ingres or
Cdzanne, but orders he takes from no man.
He is an artist, you see.

In many ways this respect for authority has

served French art well. It is the source of

that traditionalism, that tradition of high

seriousness, craftsmanship, and good taste,

127

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

which, even in the darkest days of early Vic-
torianism, saved French painting from falling
into the pit of stale vulgarity out of which
English has hardly yet crawled. French revo-
lutions in painting are fruitful, English barren
— let the Pre-Raphaelite movement be my
witness. The harvest sown by Turner and
Constable was garnered abroad. Revolutions
depart from tradition. Yes, but they depart
as a tree departs from the earth. They grow
out of it ; and in England there is no soil.
On the other hand, it is French conventionality
— for that is what this taste for discipline comes
to — which holds down French painting, as a
whole, below Italian. There are journeys a
Frenchman dare not take because, before he
reached their end, he would be confronted by
one of those bogeys before which the stoutest
French heart quails — " C'est inadmissible,"
" C'est convenu," " La patrie en danger." One
day he may be called upon to break bounds, to
renounce the national tradition, deny the pre-
eminence of his country, question the sufficiency
of Poussin and the perfection of Racine, or con-
ceive it possible that some person or thing
should be more noble, reverend, and touching
than his mother. On that day the Frenchman
will turn back. " C'est inadmissible."

France, the greatest country on earth, is
singularly poor in the greatest characters —
great ones she has galore. Her standard of
128

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

civilization, of intellectual and spiritual activity,
is higher than that of any other nation ; yet an
absence of vast, outstanding figures is one of
the most obvious facts in her history. Her
literature is to English what her painting is to
Italian. Her genius is enterprising without
being particularly bold or original, and though
it has brought so much to perfection it has dis-
covered comparatively little. Assuredly France
is the intellectual capital of the world, since,
compared with hers, all other post-Renaissance
civilizations have an air distinctly provincial.
Yet, face to face with the rest of the world,
France is provincial herself. Here is a puzzle :
a solution of which, if it is to be attempted
at all, must be attempted in another chapter.

II

For the last sixty years and more one of the
rare pleasures of political philosophers has been
to expatiate on " le droit administratif," on the
extraordinary powers enjoyed by Government
in France, whatever that government may be ;
and another pleasure, which few have denied
themselves, is that of drawing the not very
obscure inference that France is democratic
rather than liberal, and that the French genius
has no patience with extreme individualism.
If its effects were confined wholly to politics,
to criticize this national characteristic would be
129 I

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

no part of my business ; but as it has pro-
foundly influenced French art as well as French
life and thought, the reader, I trust, will not be
unbearably vexed by an essay which has little
immediately to do with the subject on which I
am paid to write. " What is the cause of
French conventionality ? " " What are its
consequences ? " These are questions to which
the student of French art cannot well be
indifferent ; and these are the questions that
I shall attempt to answer.

The cause, I suspect, is to be found in the
defect of a virtue. If it takes two to make a
quarrel it takes as many to make a bargain ;
and if even the best Frenchmen are willing to
make terms with society, that must be because
society has something to offer them worth
accepting. All conventions are limitations on
thought, feeling, and action; and, as such, are
the enemies of originality and character —
hateful, therefore, to men richly endowed
with either. French conventions, however,
have a specious air of liberality, and France
offers to him who will be bound by them
partnership in the most perfect of modern
civilizations — a civilization, be it noted, of
which her conventions are themselves an ex-
pression. The bribe is tempting. Also, the
pill itself is pleasantly coated. Feel thus,
think thus, act thus, says the French tradition,
not for moral, still less for utilitarian, reasons,
130

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

but for aesthetic. Stick to the rules, not be-
cause they are right or profitable, but because
they are seemly — nay, beautiful. We are not
telling you to be respectable, we are inviting
you not to be a lout. We are offering you,
free of charge, a trade mark that carries credit
all the world over. " How French he (or she)
is 1 " Many a foreigner' would pay hand-
somely to have as much said of him.

Any English boy born with fine sensibility,
a peculiar feeling for art, or an absolutely
first-rate intelligence finds himself, from the
outset, at loggerheads with the world in which
he is to live. For him there can be no ques-
tion of accepting those conventions which ex-
press what is meanest in an unsympathetic
society. To begin with, he will not go to
church or chapel on Sundays : it might be
different were it a question of going to Mass.
The hearty conventions of family life which
make impossible almost relations at all intimate
or subtle arouse in him nothing but a longing
for escape. He will be reared, probably, in an
atmosphere where all thought that leads to no
practical end is despised, or gets, at most, 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 Times. As
for artists, they, unless they happen to have
achieved commercial success or canonization
131

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

in some public gallery, are pretty sure to be
family jokes. Thus, all his finer feelings will
be constantly outraged ; and he will live, a
truculent, shame-faced misfit, with John Bull
under his nose and Punch round the corner,
till, at some public school, a course of com-
pulsory games and the Arnold tradition either
breaks his spirit or makes him a rebel for life.
In violent opposition to most of what sur-
rounds him, any greatly gifted, and tough,
English youth is likely to become more and
more aware of himself and his own isolation.
While his French compeer is having rough
corners gently obliterated by contact with a
well-oiled whetstone, and is growing daily
more conscious of solidarity with his partners
in a peculiar and gracious civilization, the
English lad grows steadily more individualistic.
Daily he becomes more eccentric, more ad-
venturous, and more of a " character." Very
easily will he snap all conventional cables and,
learning to rely entirely on himself, trust only
to his own sense of what is good and true and
beautiful. This personal sense is all that he
has to follow ; and in following it he will meet
with no conventional obstacle that he need
hesitate for one moment to demolish. English
civilization is so smug and hypocritical, so
grossly philistine, and at "bottom so brutal, that
every first-rate Englishman necessarily be-
comes an outlaw. He grows by kicking ;
132

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

and his personality flourishes, unhampered by
sympathetic, clinging conventions, nor much —
and this is important, too — by the inquisitorial
tyranny of Government. For, at any rate until
the beginning of the war, an Englishman who
dared to defy the conventions had less than a
Frenchman to fear from the laws.

I have already suggested that the conse-
quences of this difference between French and
English civilization may be studied in the
history of their literature and thought. For
the abject poverty of English visual art I have
attempted to give reasons elsewhere : here I
have not space to say more than that it is rarely
good for an artist to be a protestant, and that a
protestant is just what the English attitude
to painting generally forces a genuine artist to
JDC. But consider the literature of the French
Renaissance : Rabelais is the one vast figure.
Ronsard and his friends are charming, elegant,
and erudite ; but not -of the stupendous.
What is even more to the point, already with
the pleiade we have a school — a school with
its laws and conventions, its " thus far and no
further." Nothing is more notorious than the
gorgeous individualism and personality of those
flamboyant monsters whom we call the Eliza-
bethans, unless it be the absence of that quality
in the great French writers of the next age.
Had Pascal been as bold as Newton he might
have been as big. No one will deny that
133

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

Descartes was a finer intelligence than Hobbes,
or that his meticulous respect for French sus-
ceptibilities gave an altogether improbable turn
to his speculations. In the eighteenth century
it was the English who did the discovering and
the French who, on these discoveries being de-
clared admissibles, brought them to perfection.
Even in the nineteenth, the Revolution not-
withstanding, French genius, except in paint-
ing, asserted itself less vividly and variously
than the Russian or English, and less emphati-
cally than the German.

In recording the consequences of this French
taste for authority we have had to register
profit and loss. It is true that the picture
presented by French history offers compara-
tively few colossal achievements or stupendous
characters. With the latter, indeed, it is
particularly ill-supplied. Whereas most of the
great and many of the secondary English
writers, thinkers, and artists have been great
" characters," the slightly monotonous good
sense and refinement of French literary and
artistic life is broken only by a few such mas-
sive or surprising figures as those of Rabelais,
La Fontaine, Poussin, Rousseau, Flaubert,
Ce*zanne — a formidable list but a short one,
to which, however, a few names could be added.
On the other hand, what France has lost in
colour she has gained in fertility ; and in a
universal Honours List for intellectual and
134

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

artistic prowess the number of French names
would be out of all proportion to the size and
wealth of the country. Furthermore, it is this
traditional basis that has kept French culture
up to a certain level of excellence. France
has never been without standards. There-
fore it has been to France that the rest of
Europe has always looked for some measure
of fine thinking, delicate feeling, and general
amenity. Without her conventionality it may
be doubted whether France could have re-
mained so long the centre of civilization.

One commonly deplored consequence of
French conventionality is that it makes French-
men incapable of well understanding or appre-
ciating anything foreign, or of judging acutely
between foreigners and themselves. But is
even this a serious misfortune ? French critics
can discriminate between French productions
with unsurpassable delicacy and precision.
As for the spring of French inspiration,
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
departure, to the grasping of which its im-
perfect knowledge and unprehensile taste are
adequate. Indeed, the rare endeavours of
Frenchmen seriously to cultivate alien methods
and points of view more often than not end in
disaster. Shortly before the war a school of
particularly intelligent and open-minded writers
135

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

discovered, what we in England are only too
familiar with, the aesthetic possibilities of
charity and the beauty of being good. Dos-
toevsky began it. First, they ran after him ;
then, setting themselves, as well as they could,
to study Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, in
translations, they soon plunged miserably into
a morass of sentimentality. A gifted novelist
and a charming poet, Charles-Louis Philippe
and Vildrac, were amongst the first to fall in.
A Wordsworth can moralize, a Sterne can pipe
his eye, with impunity ; 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 tradition.

The reason why Frenchmen are incompetent
to judge or appreciate what is not French is that

*•"" they apply to all things the French measure.

&•" They have no universal standards, and, what is

t-s worse, they take for such their own conventions.
To read a French critic on Shakespeare or
Ibsen or Dostoevsky or Goethe is generally a
f / humiliating experience for one who loves
France. As often as not you will find that he
is depending on a translation. 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 understand.

y[ Rather it seems to him ludicrous that books
should be written in any language but his own ;
136

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

and, until they are translated, for him they do
not exist. Many years ago, at Cambridge,
I remember having a sharpish altercation with
Rupert Brooke, who had taken it upon himself
to denigrate the art of Racine. Before long it
came out that he had read the plays only in a
translation ; for at that time — he was in his
second year, I think — he had little or no French.
Everyone laughed, and the argument collapsed.
Set the scene in Paris, imagine a detractor of
Shakespeare or Goethe being convicted of
similar ignorance, and ask yourself whether one
Frenchman of the party would have felt that
by such an admission the critic was put out of
court.

It cannot be denied, I fear, that the conven-
tional habits of the French mind lead easily to
ignorance and self-satisfaction. To be frank,
the complacent aberrations of French taste,
with its passion for Poe and its pathetic con-
fidence in Kipling and Chesterton, have be-
come a standing joke abroad. There is no
great reason why the French should know any-
thing of foreign thought and literature ; but
there is every reason why, knowing nothing,
they should refrain from comment. And how
many Frenchmen do know anything ? When
I reflect that hardly one can quote a line of
English without committing or, at any rate,
permitting the grossest and most nonsensical
blunders, I am inclined to suspect that the
137

ORDER AND AUTHORITY

answer is, very few. 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 provinciality.
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 steer. 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 re-
marks. Undeniably the creature is a bit thick
in the girth and, what is worse, bull-necked.
Only, as the points of an ox are different from
those of a poodle, the criticism is something
beside the mark : and there is not much more
virtue in the objection to Shakespeare's later
tragedies that they are not written in rhymed
verse. Blank verse, however, is not in the
great tradition ; and the French critic, with
one eye fixed submissively on authority, doubts
whether he would be justified in admiring it
unreservedly. Such are the inevitable con-
sequences of conventionality : and French con-
ventionality is, in its turn, the inevitable con-
sequence of a civilization so gracious and at-
trctive that even the most lawless of its children
cannot bear to appear disloyal.

'38

MARQUET'

The best picture by Marquet I ever saw was
in the Grafton Gallery exhibition of 1912.
It represented a naked woman sitting in a rock-
ing-chair. Since then I have seen scores of
things by him, admirable, as a rule, and in-
variably brilliant, but never one that was quite
first-rate. And here comes M. George Besson,
with an essay and an album of photographs, to
show us a few works which, surpassing any-
thing of which we had supposed him capable,
emerge triumphantly from that stream of clever
variations on a theme which Marquet has made
only too much his own.

Anyone who compares these nudes with what
Matisse was doing a dozen or fifteen years ago
will not fail to discover a common factor :
neither will he be surprised to learn that at one
time these two artists were treated almost as
equals. Both achieved a strange and disquiet-
ing intensity by bold simplifications and dis-
tortion, by concentration on the vital move-
ments and characteristics of the human body,
and by an absolute indifference to its literary
and sentimental interest. " Lorsque je dessine
j'ai devant un homme les m§mes pre*occupa-
tions que devant un bee de gaz." That is well
said : what is more, the saying has been put
successfully into practice. Such pictures as
numbers 19, 25, and 27 are entitled to a
* Marquet. Par George Besson.
139

MARQUET

place beside those of no matter what con-
temporary.

Needless to say, the integrity of Marquet's
vision has considerably distressed those who
have no taste for art ; and from one of them,
Marquet's friend Charles-Louis Philippe, it
drew a bit of art criticism that ought not to
be lost. " Le ciel me preserve," exclaims the
author of Marie Donadieu^ " d'aimer d'un
amour total un art dont 1'ironie parfois atteint
a la cruaute* ! Et quand, tous les usages admis
qui veulent qu'on ne pre"sente un homme
que sous ses bons cote's, quand 1'amitie' me~me
que j'e*prouve pour M. Marquet m'eussent en-
gage", a me taire, un devoir plus impe'rieux me
sollicitait, et j'aurais eu le sentiment de me
rabaisser moi-me'me en y manquant."

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 duty. So
Monsieur Philippe very honourably concludes
his observations by expressing the opinion that
" il n'a pas droit a toute 1'admiration des
hommes puisqu'il a e*te* sans pitieV'

The cry of this soft and silly sentimentalist
has been neatly put by M. Besson to the pur-
pose of illustrating, and perhaps a little exag-
gerating, the merits of a painter who is, as-
suredly, neither one nor the other. Too clever
by half, that rather is the fault with which
Marquet must be taxed. The artist who has
140

MARQUET

given us a dozen first-rate things — superb
nudes, " felt " as solid, three-dimensional
forms, and realized as such — is always being
forestalled by an astonishing caricaturist who
can knock you off something brilliant, rapid,
and telling while you wait for the boat. Al-
ways 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 form. The landscapes and boats
and street-scenes of Marquet, with their
joyously emphatic statement, their lively con-
trasts, and their power of giving you the pith
of the matter in a few strokes, are about as
valuable as the best things of Forain. They
are statements of fact, not expressions of
emotion. Marquet, the inimitable captor of
life as it hurries by, is not much better than a
caricaturist ; and as he becomes more and more
proficient in his craft he bothers less and less
about that to which it should be a means.
The art of Marquet tends ever to become the
repetition of a formula.

Lately, in London, we have been looking at
the works of Pissarro, and I could wish that
Marquet would look at them, too. Like him,
Pissarro was a painter of streets and landscapes
who returned again and again to the same
motif. In the course of a long life he must,
I should think, have painted the Quai Voltaire,
the Quai des Grands Augustins, and the Quai

MARQUET

St. Michel almost as often as Marquet has
knocked them off. And if Pissarro never in-
vented a shorthand wherewith to make notes of
what was going on beneath his window, that
was because Pissarro, for all his impressionist
theory, was less concerned with the transitory
aspect of things than with their aesthetic
significance. He, too, approached everything,
men and women, trees, rivers, and houses,
in the same spirit : he approached them in the
spirit of a painter. Never for the ugliest
harlot, the sorriest thief, or the most woe-
begone gas-jet did he feel that whimpering,
simpering, sentiment that Tolstoy frankly ad-
mired and Philippe felt the want of. But al-
ways he seems to have seen his motif with the
finely disinterested passion of an artist. Now,
the passion of an artist is not to be jotted down :
it has to be deliberately transmuted into form.
If Marquet were as familiar with naked
women as he is with the hats, coats, and petti-
coats he sees from his window, doubtless by
this time he would have elaborated a set of
symbols wherewith to record his sense of them.
Happily he is not : so, before the model, he
finds himself obliged to demand of the artist
that is in him some plastic equivalent for his
intense and agitated vision. Thus goaded and
disarmed he can produce a masterpiece. And,
therefore, were it for me to give advice, what I
should say to Marquet would be — throw away
142

MARQUET

your sketch-book and panel-box, and settle
down in a studio, with a top light, a model or
two, and a six-foot canvas. Only, as this must
be just what M. Lhote has been telling him,
naturally he would tell me to mind my own
business.

His apologist, M. Besson, at any rate, has no
patience with those who would set artists in the
way they should go. In this essay he gives
them a piece of his mind, and he does it so well
and so gaily that it is a pleasure to be scolded.
First, he has a few words with " une dame, que
Ge'rome fit heritiere de ses uniformes et qui
devint la muse d'un gdometre-arpenteur de
certaine r^cente peinture." (Whom can he
mean ?)

Je connais 1'a teller de Marquet, Madame, en marge de
1'Atelier ou Ton esthe'tise, ou Ton fabrique les manifestos et
les novateurs de ge"nie. Marquet garde son r&le de peintre.
II n'est guere pour lui de souci plus se'rieux que le souci de
sa liberte. II veut gtre libre pour peindre, libre meme pour
oublier la peinture, libre encore, libre davantage pour n'gtre
ni questionne" ni consult^, pour ne devenir ni un expert, ni
un e*ducateur de sots.

Et voila pourquoi, vous n'avez jamais fait de conference
en son atelier.

And again :

Pour n'avoir jamais asservi son art a la construction d'un
systeme, pour avoir senti la vanite des theories, pour n'avoir
pas fait tout les pelerinages d'ou Ton revient avec des regies,
1'art d'Albert Marquet donne une impression de peinture
heureuse.

MARQUET

Of course M. Besson is right. Few in this
world cut a more ludicrous figure than art-
masters ; few things are more deplorable than
propaganda. Yet M. Besson should be care-
ful : one thing there is more ridiculous still,
and that is counter-propaganda. Protestant-
ism in art is the devil ; but the devil is not such
a fool as to protest against protestantism. He
leaves that to the young bloods of the Rotonde
and the Cafe" Royal. By all means let M.
Besson claim liberty for his artist, but, in doing
so, let him beware of denying it to another,
even though what that other demands be
" liberty of prophesying " or the right to preach
the gospel according to David.

144

STANDARDS

Some people in England are beginning to
realize that while we have been " saving
civilization," first from Germans, and then
from Bolsheviks, we have come near losing it
ourselves.* This disquieting truth has been
borne in on them by various signs and portents,
not least by the utter collapse of taste. At life's
feast we are like people with colds in their
heads : we have lost all power of discrimina-
tion. As ever, " Dido, Queen of Carthage,"
and better things than that, are caviare to the
general : what is new, and worse, to our most
delicate epicures bloater paste is now caviare.
At a London dinner-party even a peeress,
even an American lady who has married a peer,
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 reproach. We
have as little confidence in our critics as in our
ministers. Indeed, since all our officers, and
most of our privates, took to publishing pages
of verse or, at any rate, of prose that looks odd
enough to be verse, the habit of criticism has
been voted unpatriotic. 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 and, what is worse,
* Written in March 1919.

145 K

STANDARDS

fastidious. Our critics were neither ; they did
their bit : and no one was surprised to hear the
stuff with which schoolboys line their lockers
described as " one of the truest, deepest, and
most moving notes that have been struck since
the days of Elizabeth."

This sort of thing was encouraging at the
time, and kept our lads in good heart ; but.
in the long run, it has proved demoralizing to
our critics as well as to their clients. For, now
that the war is over, those who so loyally pro-
claimed that any bugle-boy was a better musi-
cian than any fiddler find themselves incapable
of distinguishing, not only between fiddlers,
but even between buglers. Perhaps it was
natural that when, during the war, T. S. Eliot,
about the best of our young poets — if ours I
may call him — published Prufrock, no English
paper, so far as I know, should have given him
more than a few words of perfunctory en-
couragement : natural that when Virginia
Woolf, the best of our younger novelists, and
Middleton Murry published works of curious
imagination and surprising subtlety, critics,
worn in the service of Mr. Bennett of the
Propaganda Office and our Mr. "Wells, should
not have noticed that here were a couple of
artists : but is it not as strange as sad that our
patriot geese, time out of mind a nation's
oracles, should still be unable to tell us whether
Lieutenant Brooke, Captain Nicholls, Major
146

STANDARDS

Grenfell, or Lieut.-Colonel Maurice Baring is
the greatest poet of this age ?

And in painting and music things are no
better. Even our old prejudices are gone. All
is welcome now, except real art ; and even that
gets splashed in the wild outpour of adulation.
To admire everything is, perhaps, a more
amiable kind of silliness than to admire no-
thing : it is silliness all the same. Also, it has
brought taste to such a pass that, except the
Russian ballet, there was not last winter* in
London one entertainment at which a person
of reasonable intelligence could bear to spend
an hour. As for the ballet, it was a music-hall
turn, lasting fifteen minutes, which the public
seemed to like rather better than the perform-
ing dogs and distinctly less than the ventrilo-
quist. The public accepted it because it ac-
cepts whatever is provided. Nevertheless, the
subtler of our music-hall comedians have
obviously been ordered to coarsen their methods
or clear out, and the rare jokes that used to re-
lieve the merry misery of our revues and plays
are now dispensed with as superfluous.

The war is not entirely to blame : the disease
was on us long before 1914. War, however,
created an atmosphere in which it was bound to
prevail. Active service conditions are notori-
ously unfavourable to the critical spirit. The
army canteen need not tempt its customers :
* The winter 1918-19.

»47

STANDARDS

neither need the ordinary shop under a ration-
ing system : and, it must be confessed, the habit
of catering for colonial soldiers has not tended
to make our public entertainments more subtle
or amusing. But the disease of which taste is
sick unto death has been on us these fifty years.
It is the emporium malady. We are slaves of
the trade-mark. Our tastes are imposed on us
by our tradesmen, under which respectable title
I include newspaper owners, booksellers' touts,
book-stall keepers, music-hall kings, opera
syndicates, picture-dealers, and honest bagmen.
As for the tradesman, he is no longer an ex-
pert any more than the critic or the impressario
is. No longer a merchant, no longer a shop-
keeper even, he is to-day a universal provider.
Fifty years ago the nice housewife still prided
herself on knowing the right place for every-
thing. There was a little man in a back street
who imported just the coffee she wanted, an-
other who blended tea to perfection, a third
who could smoke a ham as a ham should be
smoked. All have vanished now ; and the
housewife betakes herself to the stores. We
no longer insist on getting what we like, we like
what we get. The March Hare's paradox has
ceased to be paradoxical. For five years
Europe has been doing what it was told to do ;
for five years our experts have subjected their
critical sense to a sense of patriotism and a de-
sire to keep in with the majority ; at last the
148

STANDARDS

producers themselves have lost their sense of
values and can no longer test the quality of their
own productions. There are no standards.

Let no one imagine that standards are, like
police regulations, things that can be imposed
by authority. Standards exist in the mind,
where they grow out of that personal sense of
values which is one of the twin pillars on which
civilization rests. All that authority can do
is to stimulate and sharpen that sense by subtle
education and absolute sincerity. The critic
can put good things in another man's way and
present them in a sympathetic light ; also, he
can resolutely refuse ever to pretend that he
likes what he does not like. Standards are im-
posed from above in the sense that people
who have the ability and leisure to cultivate
their sense of values will, if they take advantage
of their opportunities, inevitably influence those
less favourably placed. In the fine arts, cer-
tainly, taste is bound to be very much directed
by people blest with peculiar gifts and armed
with special equipment. But, besides taste
in the fine arts, there is such a thing as taste in
life ; a power of discerning and choosing for
one's self in life's minor matters ; and on this
taste in life, this sense of the smaller values,
is apt to flourish that subtler and more precious
aesthetic sense. Without this taste no civiliza-
tion can exist ; for want of it European civiliza-
tion is seemingly about to perish.
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STANDARDS

Take the thing at its lowest. A rich, good-
humoured fellow, replete with a fabulously ex-
pensive but distressingly ill-chosen dinner in a
magnificently ill-furnished and over-lit restaur-
ant, excited by Saumur (recommended as
" Perrier Jouet, 1911 ") and a great deal of
poor conversation drowned, for the most part,
by even noisier music, may be heard to say,
as he permits the slovenly waiter to choose him
the most expensive cigar — " That will do,
sonny, the best's good enough for me." The
best is not good enough for anyone who has
standards; but the modern Englishman seems
to have none. To go to the most expensive
shop and buy the dearest thing there is his
notion of getting the best. You may dine at
any of the half-dozen " smartest " restaurants
in London, pay a couple of pounds for your
meal, and be sure that a French commercial
traveller, bred to the old standards of the
provincial ordinary, would have sent for the
cook and given him a scolding. It is not to be
supposed that the most expensive English
restaurants fail to engage the most expensive
French chefs ; they are engaged, but they soon
fall below the mark because there is no one
to keep them up to it. The clients have no
standards. Go to the opera and look at the
rich ladies' frocks : they might have come
out of an antimacassar factory. They express
no sense of what is personally becoming nor a
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STANDARDS

sense of insolent luxury even : they bear wit-
ness to an utter lack of standards, and they cost
a great deal of money. The best is good
enough for these fine ladies, and their best is
the dressmaker's most expensive.

This is no mere question of fashions and con-
ventions. If standards go, civilization goes.
To hear people talk you might suppose there
had never been such things as dark ages. Not
only have there been dark ages, there has been
an unmeasured tract of pre-historic savagery,
and sharp eyes — notably those of Louis Weber
— are beginning to detect certain similarities
between this age and that. The peculiarity of
the historic age, man's brilliant age, the age
of civilization, is the conservatism of its tech-
nique and its spiritual restlessness. In the pre-
historic age man's best energies were ap-
parently devoted to perfecting the means to
material existence. Improving the instrument
was the grand preoccupation. From the old
stone age to the new, from that to bronze,
and from bronze to iron is the story of pre-
historic development. Then follow some forty
centuries during which man rests content with
his instrument. Between the Minoan age
and the Industrial Revolution his technical dis-
coveries are insignificant by comparison with
his spiritual adventures. Content with the
plough, the wagon, and the loom, man turns
the sharp edge of his mind to things of the

STANDARDS

mind, considers himself in all his relations,
thinks, feels, states, expresses, concerns himself
with spiritual, rather than material, problems.
With the Industrial Revolution begins the
third act. Again human intelligence and in-
genuity concentrate on the prehistoric problem
— the perfecting of the instrument. For a
hundred years Europe marches merrily back
towards barbarism. Then, at the very moment
when she is becoming alarmed and self-critical,
at the very moment when she is wondering
how she is to reconcile her new material am-
bitions with the renascent claims of the spirit,
comes a war that relegates to the dust-bin or
the gaol all that is not of immediate practical
utility. The smoke of battle drifts slowly away
and reveals a situation almost hopeless. We have
lost our standards, our taste in life : we have
lost the very thing by which we recognized
that there were such things as spiritual values.
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 class. It maintained
standards. Unlike the English, it concerned
itself neither with politics nor with money-
making, nor yet with local affairs : it stood
apart, " formant dans la nation une classe qui
n'avait d'autre souci que les choses liberales."
Renan recognized that a leisured class is the
source of civilization ; whether he also recog-
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STANDARDS

nized that there is no earthly reason why a
leisured class should be the ruling class is not
clear. In Europe we have now no leisured
class ; we have only a number of rich men, mere
wealth-producers, who perform for high wages
the useful functions that miners and milkmaids
perform for low ones. Our leisured class, mori-
bund before the war, died peacefully in its sleep
the year before last. There is no class on this
side the Atlantic to insist on quality now. But
if, as I am told, we all owe money to America,
has not America acquired, along with her finan-
cial supremacy, certain moral obligations? Has
she not become the leisured class of the world,
and, as such, responsible to civilization for the
maintenance of those standards without which
civilization falls ? If so, it is for America to
insist in the fine arts on some measure of talent
and intelligence, in society on decent manners,
in life on a critical attitude: it is for her to
reaffirm those standards of excellence below
which neither art nor thought nor manners
nor merchandize shall be suffered to fall : for
her to teach us once again to be fastidious, to
embolden us to say to a poet, a painter, a
politician, a newspaper proprietor, or even to
a mattre d' hotel — "This is not good enough."
America possesses the means; she can crack
the only whip that carries much conviction
nowadays. Whether she has the will to use it
is quite another matter.

*53

CRITICISM

(i) Criticism

Critics do not exist for artists any more than
palaeontologists exist for fossils. If both critics
and artists could recognize this, how much
poorer the world would be in malice and ran-
cour ! To help the artist is no part of a critic's
business : artists who cannot help themselves
must borrow from other artists. The critic's
business is to help the public. With the
artist he is not directly concerned : he is con-
cerned only with his finished products. So it
is ridiculous for the artist to complain that
criticism is unhelpful, and absurd for the critic
to read the artist lectures with a view to im-
proving his art. If the critic reads lectures it
must be with a view to helping the public to
appreciate, not the artist to create. To put
the public in the way of aesthetic pleasure, that
is the end for which critics exist, and to that
end all means are good.

Connoisseurs in pleasure — of whom I count
myself one — know that nothing is more in-
tensely delightful than the aesthetic thrill.
Now, though many are capable of tasting this
pleasure, few can get it for themselves : for
only those who have been born with a peculiar
sensibility, and have known how to cherish it,
enjoy art naturally, simply, and at first hand
as most of us enjoy eating, drinking, and kiss-
ing. But, fortunately, it is possible for the
'54

CRITICISM

peculiarly sensitive, or for some of them, by
infecting others with their enthusiasm, to throw
these into a state of mind in which they, too,
can experience the thrill of aesthetic compre-
hension. And the essence of good criticism is
this : that, instead of merely imparting to others
the opinions of the critic, it puts them in a
state to appreciate the work of art itself. A
man blest with peculiar sensibility, who happens
also to possess this infecting power, need feel
no more shame in becoming a critic than
Socrates would have felt in becoming a don.
The vocations are much alike. The good
critic puts his pupil in the way of enjoying art,
the good don or schoolmaster teaches his how
to make the most of life ; while bad critics and
pedagogues stuff their victims with those most
useless of all useless things, facts and opinions.

Primarily, a critic is a sign-post. He points
to a work of art and says — " Stop I Look 1 "
To do that he must have the sensibility that
distinguishes works of art from rubbish, and,
amongst works of art, the excellent from the
mediocre. Further, the critic has got to con-
vince, he has got to persuade the spectator
that there is something before him that is really
worth looking at. His own reaction, there-
fore, must be genuine and intense. Also,
he must be able to stimulate an appreciative
state of mind ; he must, that is to say, have the
art of criticism. He should be able, at a pinch,

CRITICISM

to disentangle and appraise the qualities which
go to make up a masterpiece, so that he may
lead a reluctant convert by partial pleasures
to a sense of the whole. And, because nothing
stands more obstructively between the public
and the grand aesthetic ecstasies than the habit
of feeling a false emotion for a pseudo-work-of-
art, he must be as remorseless in exposing
shams as a good schoolmaster would be in ex-
posing charlatans and short-cuts to knowledge.
Since, in all times and places, the essence of
art — the externalizing in form of something
that lies at the very depths of personality —
has been the same, it may seem strange, at first
sight, that critical methods should have Yaried.
One moment's reflection will suffice to remind
us that there are often ten thousand paths to the
same goal ; and a second's may suggest that
the variety in critical methods is, at any rate,
not more surprising than the variety in the
methods of artists. Always frave

striving to convert the thrill of. ^
into significant form ; never have they stuck
long to any one converting-machine. Through-
out the ages there has been a continual chop-
ping and changing of " the artistic problem."
Canons in criticism are as unessential as sub-
jects in painting. There are ends to which a
variety of means are equally good : the artist's
end is to create significant form ; that of the
critic to bring his spectator before a work of
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CRITICISM

art in an alert and sympathetic frame of mind.
If we can realize that Giotto, with his legends,
and Picasso, with his cubes, are after the same
thing, surely we can understand that when
Vasari talks of "Truth to Nature" or " nobility
of sentiment," and Mr. Roger Fry of" planes "
and " relations," both are about the same busi-
ness.

Only a fool could suppose that the ancients
were less sensitive to art than we are. Since
they were capable of producing great art it
seems silly to pretend that they were incapable
of appreciating it. We need not be dismayed
by the stories of Apelles and Polygnotus with
their plums and sparrows. These are merely
the instruments of criticism : by such crude
means did ancient critics excite the public
and try to express their own subtle feelings.
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 all. More probably a
sensitive Athenian admired them for much the
same reasons as we admire them. He felt
much what we feel : only, he expressed his
admiration and thus provoked the admiration
of others, by calling these grand, distorted, or
" idealized " figures " lifelike." Reading the
incomparable Vasari, one is not more struck
by his sensibility and enthusiasm than by the
'57

CRITICISM

improbability of his having liked the pictures
he did like for the childish reasons he is apt
to allege. Could anyone be moved by the
verisimilitude of Uccello ? I forget whether
that is what Vasari commends : what I am sure
of is that he was moved by the same beauties
that move us.

The fact is, 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
art. No one can state in words just what he
feels about a work of art — especially about a
work of visual art. He may exclaim ; indeed,
if he be a critic he should exclaim, for that is how
he arrests the public. He may go on to seek
some rough equivalent in words for his ex-
cited feelings. But whatever he may say will
amount to little more than steam let off. He
cannot describe his feelings ; he can only make
it clear that he has them. That is why
analytical criticism of painting and music is
always beside the mark : neither, I think, is
analytical criticism of literary art much more
profitable. With literature that is not> pure
art the case is different, facts and ideas being,
of course, the analyst's natural prey. But be-
fore a work of art the critic can do little more
than jump for joy. And that is all he need do
if, like Cherubino, he is " good at jumping."
The warmth and truth of Vasari's sentiment

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CRITICISM

comes straight through all his nonsense.
Because he really felt he can still arrest.

Take an artist who has always been popular,
and see what the ages have had to say about
him. For more than two hundred and fifty
years Poussin has been admired by most of
those who have been born sensitive to the
visual arts. No pretexts could be more diverse
than those alleged by these admirers. Yet it
would be as perverse to suppose that they have
all liked him for totally different reasons as to
maintain that all those who, since the middle
of the seventeenth century, have relished
strawberries have tasted different flavours.
What is more, when I read, say, the fantastic
discourses on the pictures of Poussin delivered
by the Academicians of 1667, I feel certain
that some of these erudite old gentlemen had,
in fact, much the same sort of enthusiasm,
stirred by the monumental qualities of his de-
sign and the sober glory of his colours, that I
have myself. Through all the dry dust of
their pedantry the accent of aesthetic sensibility
rings clear.

Poussin's contemporaries praised him chiefly
as a preceptor, an inculcator of historical truths,
more especially the truths of classical and
Hebrew history. That is why Philippe de
Champaigne deplores the fact that in his
Rebecca " Poussin n'ait pas traite* le sujet de son
tableau avec toute la fide'lite* de 1'histoire, parce

CRITICISM

qu'il a retranche* la representation des chameaux,
dont 1'Ecriture fait mention." But Le Brun,
approaching the question from a different angle,
comes heavily down on his scrupulous colleague
with the rejoinder that " M. Poussin a rejete"
les objets bizarres qui pouvaient debaucher
1'ceil du spectateur et 1'amuser a des minuties."
The philosophic eighteenth century remarked
with approval that Poussin was the exponent
of a wholesome doctrine calculated to advance
the happiness of mankind. But to the fervid
pages of Diderot, wherein that tender enthu-
siast extols Poussin to the skies, 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 vie," our modern sensibility
makes no response. And we are right. The
whole panegyric rings hollow. For to visual
art Diderot had no reaction, as every line he
wrote on the subject shows.

That devout critic who, in the reign of the
respectable Louis-Philippe, discovered that
" Nicolas Poussin e"tait doue* d'une foi profonde :
la pie*te* fut son seul refuge," is in the same boat.
And for companion they have Mr. Ruskin,
who, being, like them, incapable of a genuine
aesthetic emotion, is likewise incapable of in-
fecting a truly sensitive reader. So far as I
remember, Ruskin's quarrel with Poussin is
that to his picture of the Flood he has given a
prevailing air of sobriety and gloom, whereas
1 60

CRITICISM

it is notorious that an abundance of rain causes
all green things to flourish and the rocks to
shine like agate. 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 matters,
and that he is talking sense. And we feel the
same — what instance could more prettily illus-
trate my theory ? — when Delacroix passion-
ately asserts that Poussin was an arch-revolu-
tionary.*

The divergence between the pretexts alleged
by our ancestors for their enthusiasm and the
reasons given by us, moderns, is easily ex-
plained by our intense self-consciousness. We
are deeply interested in our own states of mind :
we are all psychologists now. From psychology
springs the modern interest in aesthetics ; those
who care for art and the processes of their own
minds finding themselves aestheticians willy-
nilly. Now, art-criticism and aesthetics are
two things, though at the present moment the
former is profoundly influenced by the latter.
By works of art we are thrown into an extra-
ordinary state of mind, and, unlike our fore-
fathers, we want to give some exacter account
of that state than that it is pleasant, and of the
objects that provoke it some more accurate and
precise description than that they are lifelike,

* For this little history of Poussin criticism I am indebted
to M. Paul Desjardins: Poussin (Paris, Librairie Renouard).
161 L

CRITICISM

or poetical, or beautiful even. We expect our
critics to find some plausible cause for so con-
siderable an effect. We ask too much. It is
for the assthetician to analyze a state of mind
and account for it : the critic has only to bring
into sympathetic contact the object that will
provoke the emotion and the mind that can
experience it. Therefore, all that is required
of him is that he should have sensibility,
conviction, and the art of making his convic-
tion felt. Fine sensibility he must have. He
must be able to spot good works of art. No
amount of eloquence in the critic can give
form significance. To create that is the artist's
business. It is for the critic to put the public
in the way of enjoying it.

2. Second Thoughts

It is becoming fashionable to take criticism
seriously, or, more exactly, serious critics are
trying to make it so. How far they have suc-
ceeded may be measured by the fact that we
are no longer ashamed to reprint our reviews :
how far they are justified is another question.
It is one the answer to which must depend a
good deal on our answer to that old and irritat-
ing query — is beauty absolute ? For, if the
function of a critic be merely to perform the
office of a sign-post, pointing out what he
personally likes and stimulating for that as
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CRITICISM

much enthusiasm as possible, his task is clearly
something less priestlike than it would be if,
beauty being absolute, it were his to win for
absolute beauty adequate appreciation.

I do not disbelieve in absolute beauty any
more than I disbelieve in absolute truth. On
the contrary, I gladly suppose that the proposi-
tion— this object must be either beautiful or
not beautiful — is absolutely true. Only, can
we recognize it ? Certainly, at moments we
believe that we can. We believe it when we
are taken unawares and bowled over by the
purely aesthetic qualities of a work of art.
The purely aesthetic qualities, I say, 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 re-
action to it by aesthetic qualities alone. Every
now and then the beauty, the bald miracle, the
" significant form " — if I may venture the
phrase — of a picture, a poem, or a piece of
music — -of something, perhaps, with which we
had long believed ourselves familiar — springs
from an unexpected quarter and lays us flat.
We were not on the look-out for that sort of
thing, and we abandon ourselves without
one meretricious gesture of welcome. What
we feel has nothing to do with a pre-existent
mood ; we are transported into a world washed
clean of all past experience aesthetic or senti-
mental. When we have picked ourselves up

CRITICISM

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
absolute. " This," we say, " is absolute beauty."
Perhaps it is. Only, let us hesitate to give that
rather alarming style to anything that has moved
us less rapturously or less spontaneously.

For, ninety-nine out of a hundred of our
aesthetic experiences have been carefully pre-
pared. Art rarely catches us : we go half way
to meet it, we hunt it down even with a pack
of critics. In our chastest moments we enter
a concert-hall or gallery with the deliberate
intention of being moved ; in our most
abandoned we pick up Browning or Alfred
de Musset and allow our egotism to bask in
their oblique flattery. Now, 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
beauty. The emotion that we obtain is thrill-
ing enough, and exquisite may be ; but it is
self-conscious and reminiscent : it is condi-
tioned. It is conditioned by our mood :
what is more — critics please take note — this
precedent mood not only colours and condi-
tions our experience, but draws us inevitably
towards those works of art in which it scents
sympathy and approval. To a reflective moral-
ist Wordsworth will always mean more than a
yellow primrose meant to Peter Bell. In our
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CRITICISM

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 Blake. And, behold, we
are in a world of personal predilections, a
thousand miles from absolute values.

Discussion of this question is complicated by
the fact that a belief in the absolute nature of
beauty is generally considered meritorious. It
can be hitched onto, and even made to support,
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 particular. This theory is
unpopular. Wherefore, absolute beauty is too
often fitted into a whole system of absolutes
or rather into The Absolute ; and, of course,
it would be intolerable to suppose that we could
ever fail to recognize — should I say Him ?
Unluckily, history and' personal experience —
those two black beasts of a priori idealists —
here await us. If beauty be absolute, the past
was sometimes insensitive, or we are : for the
past failed to recognize the beauty of much
that seems to us supremely beautiful, and sin-
cerely admired much that to us seems trash
And we, ourselves, did we never despise what
to-day we adore ? Murillo and Salvator Rosa
and forgers of works by both enjoyed for years
the passionate admiration of the cognoscenti
16;

CRITICISM

In Dr. Johnson's time " no composition in our
language had been oftener perused than Pom-
fret's Choice" If ever there was a man who
should have been incapable of going wrong
about poetry that man was Thomas Gray.
How shall we explain his enthusiasm for
Macpherson's fraud ? And if there be another
of whom the bowling over might be taken as
conclusive evidence in the court of literary ap-
peal that other is surely Coleridge. Hark to
him : " My earliest acquaintances will not
have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and
impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make
proselytes, not only of my companions, but of
all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank,
and in whatever place. . . . And with almost
equal delight did I receive the three or four
following publications of the same author."
That author was the Reverend Mr. Bowles.

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
value : and, of course, we all are really sensitive.
Only, it is sometimes difficult to be sure that
our thrill was the real coup de foudre and not
the mere gratification of a personal appetite.
Let us admit so much : let us admit that we do
sometimes mistake what happens to suit us for
what is absolutely and universally good ; which
once admitted, it will be easy to concede further
that no one can hope to recognize all manifesta-
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CRITICISM

tions of beauty. History is adamant against
any other conclusion. No one can quite I /
escape his age, his civilization, and his peculiar f /
disposition ; from which it seems to follow
that not even the unanimous censure of genera-
tions can utterly discredit anything. The ad-
mission comes in the nick of time : history was
on the point of calling attention to the attitude
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to
Gothic, Romanesque, and Byzantine art.

The fact is, most of our enthusiasms and anti-
pathies are the bastard offspring of a pure
aesthetic sense and a permanent disposition or
a transitory mood. The best of us start with a
temperament and a point of view, the worst
with a cut-and-dried theory of life ; and for the
artist who can flatter and intensify these we
have a singular kindness, while to him who
appears indifferent or hostile it is hard to be
even just. What is more, those who are most
sensitive to art are apt to be most sensitive to
these wretched, irrelevant implications. They
pry so deeply into a work that they cannot /
help sometimes spying on the author behind it.
And remember, though rightly we set high and
apart that supreme rapture in which we are
carried to a world of impersonal and dis-
interested admiration, our aesthetic experience
would be small indeed were it confined to this.
More often than not it must be of works that
have moved him partly by matching a mood
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CRITICISM

that the best of critics writes. More often than
not he is disentangling and exhibiting qualities
of which all he can truly say is that they have

E roved comfortable or exhilarating to a particu-
ir person at a particular moment. He is
dealing with matters of taste ; and about tastes,
you know, non est disputandum.

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
peppermints : but I do think a critic should
cultivate a sense of humour. If he be very
sure that his enthusiasm is the only appropriate
response of a perfectly disinterested sensibility
to absolute beauty, let him be as dogmatic as is
compatible with good breeding : failing that,
I counsel as great a measure of modesty as may
be compatible with the literary character. Let
him remember that, as a rule, he is not demand-
ing homage for what he knows to be absolutely
good, but pointing to what he likes and trying
to explain why he likes it. That, to my mind,
is the chief function of a critic. After all, an
unerring eye for masterpieces is perhaps of more
use to a dealer than to him. Mistakes do not
matter much : if we are to call mistakes what are
very likely no more than the records of a perverse
or obscure mood. Was it a mistake in 1890
to rave about Wagner ? Is it a mistake to find
him intolerable now ? Frankly," I suspect the
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CRITICISM

man or woman of the nineties who was un-
moved by Wagner of having wanted sensibility,
and him or her who to-day revels in that music
of being aesthetically oversexed. Be that as it
may, never to pretend to like what bores or
dislike what pleases him, to be honest in his re-
actions and exact in their description, is all I now
ask of a critic. It is asking a good deal, I think.
To a lady who protested that she knew what she
liked, Whistler is said to have replied — " So,
madame, do the beasts of the field." Do
they ? 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 papers.

3. Last Thoughts

Already I am in a scrape with the critics. I
am in a scrape for having said, a couple of
years ago, that a critic was nothing but a sign-
post, and for having added, somewhat later,
that he was a fallible sign-post at that. So
now, contributing to a supplement * which,
being written by critics, is sure to be read by
them, I naturally take the opportunity of ex-
plaining that what I said, if rightly understood,
was perfectly civil and obliging.

Perhaps I shall stand a better chance of
pardon when it is perceived that I, too, am

* Contributed to the Critical Supplement of The New
Republic.

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CRITICISM

fallible, and, what is more, that I am quite
aware of the fact. The reader can see for
himself that, from first thoughts to last —
in three years, that is — not only have my
opinions on the art of criticism been modified,
but my critical opinions have themselves be-
come less confident. So, to recall what I did
say : I said that critics exist for the public,
and that it is no part of their business to help
artists with good advice. I argued that a
critic no more exists for artists than a palaeon-
tologist does for the Dinosaurs on whose
fossils he expatiates, and that, though artists
happen to create those exciting objects which
are the matter of a critic's discourse, that dis-
course is all for the benefit of the critic's
readers. For these, I said, he is to procure
aesthetic pleasures : and his existence is made
necessary by the curious fact that, though
works of art are charged with a power of pro-
voking extraordinarily intense and desirable
emotions, 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 faculties.

A critic should be a guide and an animator.
His it is first to bring his reader into the pre-
sense of what he believes to be art, then to
cajole or bully him into a receptive frame of
mind. He must, therefore, besides convic-
tion, possess a power of persuasion and stimu-
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CRITICISM

lation ; and if anyone imagines that these are
common or contemptible gifts he mistakes.
It would, of course, be much nicer to think that
the essential part of a critic's work was the
discovery and glorification of absolute beauty :
only, unluckily, it is far from certain that
absolute beauty exists, and most unlikely, if it
does, that any human being can distinguish
it from what is relative. The wiser course,
therefore, is to ask of critics no more than
sincerity, and to leave divine certitude to
superior beings — magistrates, for instance, and
curates, and fathers of large families, _aiid_ Mr*
Bernard Shaw. At any rate, it is imprudent,
I am sure, in us critics to maintain so stoutly
as we are apt to do, 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 so, seeing that the most sensitive
people of one age have ever extolled some things
which the most sensitive of another have cried
down, and have cried down what others have
extolled. And, indeed, 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 aesthetic judgements which have • been
pronounced with equal confidence by the most
illustrious of his predecessors. No critic can
be sure that what he likes has absolute value ;
and it is a mark of mere silliness to suppose
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CRITICISM

that what he dislikes can have no value at all.
Neither is there any need of certainty. A
critic must have sincerity and conviction —
he must be convinced of the genuineness of his
own feelings. Never may he pretend to feel
more or less or something other than what he
does feel ; and what he feels he should be able
to indicate, and even, to some extent, account
for. Finally, he must have the power of in-
fecting others with his own enthusiasm. Any-
one who possesses these qualities and can do
these things I call a good critic.

" And what about discrimination ? " says
someone. " What about the very meaning of
the word ? " Certainly the power of dis-
criminating between artists, that of discriminat-
ing between the parts and qualities of a work
of art, and the still different power of dis-
criminating between one's own reactions, are
important instruments of criticism ; but they
are not the only ones, nor, I believe, are they
indispensable. At any rate, if the proper end
of criticism be the fullest appreciation of art,
if the function of a critic be the stimulation of
the reader's power of comprehending and enjoy-
ing, all means to that end must be good. The
rest of this essay will be devoted to a considera-
tion of the means most commonly employed.

Discriminating critics, as opposed to those
other two great classes — the Impressionistic
and the Biographical — are peculiar in this
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CRITICISM

amongst other things : they alone extract light
from refuse and deal profitably with bad art.
I am not going back on my axiom — the proper
end of criticism is appreciation : but I must
observe that one means of stimulating a taste
for what is most excellent is an elaborate dis-
section of what is not. I remember walking
with an eminent contributor to The New Re-
public and a lady who admired so intemperately
the writings of Rupert Brooke that our com-
panion was at last provoked into analyzing
them with magisterial severity. He concluded
by observing that a comparison of the more
airy and fantastic productions of this gallant
young author with the poems of Andrew Mar-
vell would have the instant effect of putting
the former in their place. The lady took the
hint ; and has since confessed that never before
had she so clearly seen or thoroughly enjoyed
the peculiar beauties, the sweetness, the artful
simplicity and sly whimsicality of the most
enchanting of English poets. The discrimi-
nating critic is not afraid of classifying artists
and putting them in their places. Analysis is
one of his most precious instruments. He will
pose the question — " Why is Milton a great
poet ? " — and will proceed to disengage cer-
tain definite qualities the existence of which
can be proved by demonstration and handled
objectively with almost scientific precision.
This sort of criticism was brought to perfection
173

CRITICISM

in the eighteenth century ; and certainly it did
sometimes lead critics quite out of sight and
reach of the living spirit of poetry. It was
responsible for masses of amazing obtuseness
(especially in criticism of the visual arts) ; it
was the frequent cause of downright silliness ;
it made it possible for Dr. Johnson, comment-
ing on the line Time and the hour runs through
the roughest day^ to " suppose every reader is
disgusted at the tautology " ; but it performed
the immense service of stimulating enthusiasm
for clear thought and exact expression. These
discriminating and objective critics will always
be particularly useful to those whose intellects
dominate their emotions, and who need some
sort of intellectual jolt to set their aesthetic
sensibilities going. Happily, the race shows no
signs of becoming extinct, and Sir Walter Raleigh
and M. Lanson are the by no means unworthy
successors of Dr. Johnson and Saint- Evremond.
It is inexact to say that the 'nineteenth
century invented impressionist criticism, the
nineteenth century invented nothing except
the electric light and Queen Victoria. But
it was in the later years of that century that Im-
pressionism became self-conscious and pom-
pous enough to array itself in a theory. The
method everyone knows : the critic clears his
mind of general ideas, of canons of art, and,
so far as possible, of all knowledge of good and
evil ; he gets what emotions he can from the

CRITICISM

work before him, and then confides them to the
public.* He does not attempt to criticize in the
literal sense of the word ; he merely tells us
what a book, a picture, or a piece of music
makes him feel. This method can be intensely
exciting ; what is more, it has made vast addi-
tions to our aesthetic experience. It is the in-
strument that goes deepest : sometimes it goes
too deep, passes clean through the object of
contemplation, and brings up from the writer's
own consciousness something for which in the
work itself no answerable provocation is to be
found. This leads, of course, to disappoint-
ment and vexation, or else to common dis-
honesty, and can add nothing to the reader's
appreciation. On the other hand, there are in
some works of art subtleties and adumbrations
hardly to be disentangled by any other means.
In much of the best modern poetry — since
Dante and Chaucer, I mean — there are beauties

* Happily, I have never laid great claims to that prevalent
modern virtue, originality; otherwise, I might have been
somewhat dashed by coming across the following passage,
only the other day, in the miscellaneous writings of Gibbon
(de me 3 lectures Oct. 3, 1762) : " Till now (says he) I was
acquainted only with two ways of criticising a beautiful
passage : the one, to shew, by an exact anatomy of it, the
distinct beauties of it, and whence they sprung ; the other,
an idle exclamation, or a general encomium which leaves
nothing behind it. Longinus has shewn me that there is a
third. He tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and
tells them with such energy that he communicates them."

175

CRITICISM

which would rarely have been apprehended
had not someone, throwing the whole apparatus
of objective criticism aside, vividly described,
not the beauties themselves, but what they
made him feel. And I will go so far as to ad-
mit that in a work of art there may be qualities,
significant and precious, but so recondite and
elusive that we shall hardly grasp them unless
some adventurer, guided by his own experience,
can trace their progress and show us their roots
in the mind from which they sprang.

Impressionistic criticism of literature is not
much approved nowadays, though Mr. Arthur
Symonds and one or two of his contemporaries
still preserve it from the last outrages of a
new and possibly less subtle generation, while
M. Proust, by using it to fine effect in his
extraordinary masterpiece, may even bring it
again into fashion. But it has got a bad name
by keeping low company ; for it has come to be
associated with those journalistic reviewers who
describe, not the feelings and ideas provoked
in them by reading a book, but what they
thought and felt and did at or about the time
they were supposed to be reading it. These
are the chatterboxes who will tell you how they
got up, cut themselves shaving, ate sausages,
spilt the tea, and nearly missed the train in
which they began to read the latest work of
Benedetto Croce, which, unluckily, having got
into conversation with a pretty typist or a
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CRITICISM

humorous bagman, they quite forgot, left in
the carriage, and so can tell you no more about.
But this is not Impressionism, it is mere vul-
garity.

If in literary criticism the impressionist
method is falling into disfavour, in the criticism
of music and painting it holds the field. Nor
is this surprising : to write objectively about
a symphony or a picture, to seize its peculiar
intrinsic qualities and describe them exactly
in words, is a feat beyond the power of most.
Wherefore, as a rule, the unfortunate critic
must either discourse on history, archaeology,
and psychology, or chatter about his own feel-
ings. With the exception of Mr. Roger Fry
there is not in England one critic capable of
saying so much, to the purpose, about the in-
trinsic qualities of a work of visual art as half
a dozen or more — Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr.
Murry, Mr. Squire, Mr. Clutton Brock, Sir
Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Mr. McCarthy to
begin with — can be trusted to say easily, and,
if necessary, weekly, about the intrinsic quali-
ties of a book. To be sure, Mr. Fry is a great
exception : with my own ears have I heard
him take two or three normally intelligent
people through a gallery and by severely ob-
jective means provoke in them a perfect frenzy
of enthusiasm for masterpieces of utterly
different schools and ages. Doubtless that is
what art-criticism should be ; but perhaps it is
177 M

CRITICISM

wrong to despise utterly those who achieve
something less.

Just at present it is the thing to laugh at
biographical and historical critics, a class of
which Sainte-Beuve is the obvious representa-
tive, 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 circumstances. " At any
rate," it is said, " these are not critics" I shall
not quarrel over words ; but I am persuaded
that, when they care genuinely for books and
have a gift of exposition, these perform the same
function as their more aesthetically-minded
brethren. I am sure that a causerie by Sainte-
Beuve often sends a reader, with a zest he had
never found unaided, to a book he had never
opened unadvised. There are plenty of men
and women, equipped to relish the finest and
subtlest things in literature, who can hardly
come at a book save through its author, or at
an author save through the story of his life
and a picture of his surroundings ; wherefore,
few things do more to promote and disseminate
a taste for art and letters and, I will add, for all
things of the spirit, than biographical and his-
torical criticism and the discussion of tendencies
and ideas.

And this brings me to my conclusion.
Though the immediate object of criticism is to
put readers in the way of appreciating fully a
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CRITICISM

work or works in the merit of which the critic
believes, its ultimate value lies further afield
in more general effects. Good criticism not
only puts people in the way of appreciating
particular works ; it makes them feel, it makes
them remember, what intense and surprising
pleasures are peculiar to the life of the spirit.
For these it creates an appetite, and keeps that
appetite sharp : 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 books. For,
though books, pictures, and music stand
charged with a mysterious power of delighting
and exciting and enhancing the value of life ;
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 forget. It is for critics to be ever jogging
their memories. Theirs it is to point the road
and hold open the unlocked doors. In that
way they become officers in the kingdom of the
mind, or, to use a humbler and preferable term,
essential instruments of culture.

179

OTHON FRIESZ

Friesz is a painter who has " come on " visibly
since the war. He has drawn right away from
" the field " to join those leaders — Matisse,
Picasso, Derain, Bonnard, shall we say, with
one or two more in close attendance — a cursory
glance at whom, as they flash by, provokes this
not unprofitable exclamation : " How different
they are ! " Apparently, amongst the chiefs,
that famous movement no longer counts for
much. Look at them ; to an eye at all prac-
tised these artists are as unlike each other as
are hounds to the eye of a huntsman. Cer-
tainly, they all owe something to Cezanne :
but what other important characteristic have
they in common which they do not share with
the best of the last hundred years ? It was ever
thus : the best, who are all alike in some ways,
in others are, from the first, the most sharply
differentiated simply because they are the most
personal. Also, as they mature they become
more and more peculiar because they tend to
rely less and less on anything but themselves
and the grand tradition. Each creates and in-
habits a world of his own, which, by the way,
he is apt to mistake for the world of everyone
who is not maliciously prejudiced against him.
And Friesz, whose character and intelligence
are utterly unlike those of his compeers, is now,
naturally enough, producing work which has
little in common with that even of Matisse —
180

OTHON FRIESZ

OTHON FRIESZ

Matisse, to whom, not fifteen years ago, I saw
a picture of his attributed by a competent
amateur who was the friend of both.

Friesz has an air of being more professional
than any other artist of this first rank — for
Marchand, I think, is not quite of it. Indeed,
for a moment, Friesz may appear alarmingly
professional. Certainly, he leaves nothing to
chance : all is planned, and planned not in
haste and agitation, fingers itching to be at it,
but with the deliberation, the critical thorough-
ness, of an engineer or an architect. There is
so much of the painstaking craftsman in his
method that for a moment you may overlook
the sensitive artist who conceives and executes.
But, in fact, the effective alliance of practical
intelligence with fine sensibility is the secret
of his strength, as I realized one day, when I
had the privilege of studying a large decoration
(a sketch for a fragment of which is to be seen
in this exhibition)* which Friesz had just
carried out. 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 decoration.

Large decorative schemes — when they are
not, what most are, mere wastes of tumid
pomposity — are apt to fail for one of two
reasons : either they are too much like pictures
or too little like works of art. Because very
* At the Independent Gallery, 1921.
181

OTHON FRIESZ

few artists are capable by taking thought of
adapting their means to an unfamiliar end, it
will happen that a sensitive and gifted painter
sets about a decoration as though he were
beginning an easel picture. He has his sense
of the importance of richness, of filling a pic-
ture to the brim ; he has a technique adequate
to his conception ; but he has neither the
practical readiness nor the intellectual robust-
ness which would enable him to adjust these
to a new problem. He endeavours, therefore,
to key every part of his scheme up to the highest
pitch of intensity that line and colour can bear.
He is attempting the impossible ; his concep-
tion is inappropriate ; and, in any case, his
technique is unequal to so vast an undertaking.
He produces something which may be delicious
in detail but is pretty sure to be unsatisfactory
as a whole. He fails to fill his space. His
work has the vice of Sidney's Arcadia and the
Religio Medici ; it is good to dip into. You
cannot write an epic as though it were a sonnet.
On the other hand, you must not write an
epic as though you were telling a tale in the bar-
parlour, lest you should create another Earthly
Paradise, leaving quite untouched the subtler
and more energetic chords in your listener's
appreciative faculty. The craftsman decorator,
though he may know how to fill vast spaces,
will never fill them with lively images. His
plan may be cleverly devised to surmount
182

OTHON FRIESZ

difficulties of structure and material ; it will
not be inspired. Incapable of keying his
instrument too high, he will be satisfied with a
slack string and abominable flatness. His
forms will be conventional ; his handling im-
personal ; ten to one he will give us a row of
insipid Gothic figures or something in the
pseudo- Veronese taste.

Almost everyone would admit that, con-
sidered as pictures, those great decorations in
the Doges' Palace were a little empty; no one
can deny that as parts of a vast scheme they are
superbly adequate. Very much the same might
be said of the decorations I have in mind.
It is clear that Friesz plotted and reasoned with
himself until he had contrived a method of
matching means with ends. By constructing
it out of forms less charged, more fluent, and
more in the nature of arabesques than those he
habitually employs he gave to his scheme con-
tinuity and easy comprehensibility : but never
did he allow those forms to subside into mere
coloured spaces, or the lines to become mere
flourishes : always every detail was doing some-
thing, and so the whole was significant and
alive. The scheme which was planned with
caution was carried through with passion.

Now, obviously, a painter capable of perform-
ing this feat must possess a rare, at this moment
possibly unique, gift. Friesz is one who can
bring the whole weight of his intellect to bear
'83

OTHON FRIESZ

on his sensibility. That sensibility let no one
underrate. Before his vision of the external
world, especially before what we are pleased to
call Nature, Friesz has a reaction as delicate
and enthusiastic as that of an English poet.
Only, unlike most English painters, he would
never dream of jotting it down and leaving it
at that. Such hit-or-miss frivolity is not in
his way. He is no amateur. He takes his im-
pressions home and elaborates them ; he brings
his intellect to bear on them ; and, as this ex-
hibition shows, without robbing them of their
bloom, makes of them something solid and
satisfying. To realize what a power this is we
may, I hope without indiscretion, glance for
an instant at another handsomely endowed
French painter. That M. Lhote does not
want for sensibility is shown by his sketches
and water-colours, that his intellect is sharp
enough is proved by his writings ; but the
devitalized rectitude of his more ambitious
pieces shows how appallingly difficult it is to
bring intellect to bear on sensibility without
crushing it. The failure of M. Lhote is the
measure of M. Friesz's achievement.

If I am right, it is only natural that pictures
by Friesz should improve on acquaintance.
The studied logic of the composition may for a
time absorb the spectator's attention and blind
him to more endearing qualities ; but, sooner
or later, he will begin to perceive not only that
184

OTHON FRIESZ

a scrupulously honest vision has been converted
into a well-knit design, but that the stitches are
lovely. In every part he will be discovering
subtle and seductive harmonies and balances
of which the delicacy dawns on him as he gazes.
The more he looks the more will he get of that
curiously gratifying thrill which comes of the
recognition of unostentatious Tightness.

But, though he offers the sensitive amateur
an unusually generous allowance of the
amateur's most delicate pleasure, Friesz is,
above all, a painters' painter. He has been
called a theorist. And, because he is a painter
of exceptionally good understanding, who
thinks logically about his art and can find words
for what he thinks, I suppose the appellation
is admissible. But, remember, he never dreams
of trying to convert his theories of art into
theories of life. His are not of the kind that can
be so converted ; I said he was a painters', not
a journalists', painter. Also, unlike the theories
of the mere craftsman, his are based always on
the assumption that there is such a thing as art
— something that is created by and appeals to
peculiar faculties, something rare and personal,
something not to be had simply by taking
thought and pains, something as utterly unlike
honest craftsmanship as it is unlike the cryptic
mutterings of boozy mountebanks : subject,
however, to this assumption, his theories are
severely practical. They have to do solely with
185

OTHON FRIESZ

the art of painting ; they are born of his own
experience ; and he makes visible use of them.
That is why I call Friesz a painters' painter.
I wonder whether the Italian Primitives, with
that disquietingly unself-conscious inspiration
of theirs, directed with such amazing confidence
along well devised, practical channels, were not
a little like him.

The exhibition is fairly representative of
Friesz's later work ; and if it cannot be said
quite to summarize a stage of his career, at
least it is a milestone. Friesz has arrived :
that is to say, what he has already achieved
suffices to affirm the existence of a distinct,
personal talent entitled to its place in the
republic of painting. At that point we leave
him. But we may be sure that, with his re-
markable gift and even more remarkable power
of turning it to account, his energy, his patience,
and his manifest ambition, he will soon have
gone beyond it.

186

WILCOXISM

To return from Paris, full of enthusiasm for
contemporary art, and find oneself forced im-
mediately into an attitude of querulous hos-
tility is surely a melancholy thing. It is my
fate ; but it is not my fault. Had I found our
native quidnuncs in a slightly less exalted
humour, had they gushed a little less over their
imperial painters at Burlington House, had
they made the least effort to preserve a sense
of proportion, I, for my part, had held my
peace. But, deafened by the chorus of hearty
self-applause with which British art has just
been regaling itself,* 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 disagreeable.

In that delightful book The Worlds and 7,
for bringing me acquainted with which I shall
ever be grateful to The Athenteum, nothing is
more delightful than the chapter in which Mrs.
Wilcox takes us through the list of the great
writers she has known. We are almost as
much pleased by the authoress's confident ex-
pectation that we shall be thrilled to learn any
new fact about Miss Aldrich, who wrote " one
of the most exquisite lyrics in the language " ;
about Rhoda Hero Dunn, " a genius " with
" an almost Shakespearean quality in her
verse," or about Elsa Barker, whose poem
* February 1920.
I87

WILCOXISM

The Frozen Grail, " dedicated to Peary and
his band, is an epic of august beauty," and
whose sonnet When I am Dead " ranks with
the great sonnets of the world," as she would
be surprised to discover that we had never
heard of one of them. Mrs. Wilcox believed,
in perfect good faith, that the crowd of maga-
zine-makers with whom she associated were,
in fact, the great figures of the age. She had
no reason for supposing that we should not be
as much interested in first-hand personal gossip
about Zona Gale and Ridgeley Torrence,
Arthur Grissom (first editor of the Smart Set\
Judge Malone, Theodosia Garrison, and Julie
Opp Faversham (" even to talk with whom
over the telephone gives me a sense of larger
horizons ") as we should have been in similar
gossip about Swinburne and Hardy, Henry
James and Mallarme', Laforgue, Anatole France,
Tolstoy, Tchehov, or Dostoevsky.

And, as Mrs. Wilcox had no reason for sup-
posing that her friends were not the greatest
writers alive, what reason had she for supposing
that they were not the greatest that ever lived ?
Without the taste, the intelligence, or the
knowledge which alone can give some notion of
what's what in art, she was obliged to rely on
more accessible criteria. The circulation of
her own works, for instance, must have com-
pared favourably with that of most poets. To
be sure there was Shakespeare and the cele-
188

WILCOXISM

brated Hugo — or was it Gambetta ? But
what grounds could there be for thinking that
she was not superior to the obscure John Donne
or the obscurer Andrew Marvel, or to Arthur
Rimbaud, of whom no one she had ever heard
of had ever heard ? Mrs. Wilcox was not
dishonest in assuming that the most successful
writer in her set was the best in the world ;
she was not conceited even ; she was merely
ridiculous.

It is disquieting to find the same sort of thing
going on in England, where our painters are
fiercely disputing with each other the crown
of European painting, and our critics apprais-
ing the respective claims of Mr. Augustus John
and Mr. John Nash as solemnly as if they were
comparing Cezanne with Renoir. It is more
than disquieting, it is alarming, to detect symp-
toms of the disease — this distressing disease of
Wilcoxism — in The Athenxum itself. Yet I
am positive that not long since I read in this
very paper that Mr. Wyndham Lewis was
more than a match for Matisse and Derain ;
and, having said so much, the critic not un-
naturally went on to suggest that he was a
match for Lionardo da Vinci. Since then I
have trembled weekly lest the infection should
have spread to our literary parts. Will it be
asserted, one of these Fridays, that the appe-
tizing novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan are dis-
tinctly better than Hardy's Wessex tales, and
189

WILCOXISM

comparable rather with the works of Jane
Austen ?

To save ourselves from absurdity, and still
more to save our painters from inspissating
that trickle of fatuity which wells from heads
swollen with hot air, critics should set them-
selves to check this nasty malady. Let them
make it clear that to talk of modern English
painting as though it were the rival of modern
French is silly. In old racing days — how
matters stand now I know not — it used to be
held that French form was about seven pounds
below English : the winner of the Derby, that
is to say, could generally give the best French
colt about that weight and a beating. In
painting, English form is normally a stone be-
low French. At any given moment the best
painter in England is unlikely to be better than
a first-rate man in the French second class.
Whistler was never a match for Renoir, Degas,
Seurat, and Manet ; but Whistler, Steer, and
Sickert may profitably be compared with Boudin,
Jongkind, and Berthe Morisot. And though
Duncan Grant holds his own handsomely with
Marchand, Vlaminck, Lhote, de Segonzac,
Bracque and Modigliani, I am not yet pre-
pared to class him with Matisse, Picasso, De-
rain, and Bonnard.

Having bravely recognized this disagreeable
truth, let us take as much interest in contem-
porary British painting as we can. I will try
190

WILCOXISM

to believe that it merits more enthusiasm than
I have been able to show, provided it is not
made a point of patriotism to excite oneself
about the Imperial War Museum's pictures
exhibited at Burlington House. As a matter
of fact, 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 sensibility. Mr. Wilson Steer's pic-
ture seemed to me the best in the place, just
because Mr. Steer has eyes with which, not
only to see, but to feel. To see is something ;
Mr. Steer also feels for what he sees ; and this
emotion is the point of departure for his pic-
tures. 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 unfortunate ; still, he does convey to
us some modicum of the thrill provoked in
him by his vision of Dover Harbour.

Those thoughtful young men, on the other
hand, whose works have been causing such a
commotion might almost as well have been
blind. They seem to have seen nothing ;
at any rate, they have not reacted to what they
saw in that particular way in which visual
artists react. They are not expressing what
they feel for something that has moved them
as artists, but, rather, what they think about
something that has horrified them as men.
Their pictures depart, not from a visual sensa-
191

WILCOXISM

tion, but from a moral conviction. So, natur-
ally enough, what they produce is mere " arty "
anecdote. This, perhaps, is the secret of their
success — their success, I mean, with the culti-
vated public. Those terrible young fellows
who were feared to be artists turn out after all
to be innocent Pre-Raphaelites. They leave
Burlington House without a stain upon their
characters.

This is plain speaking ; how else should a
critic, who believes that he has diagnosed the
disease, convince a modern patient of his par-
lous state ? To just hint a fault and hesitate
dislike (not Pope, but I split that infinitive)
is regarded nowadays merely as a sign of a base,
compromising spirit ; or not regarded at all.
Artists, especially in England, cannot away
with qualified praise or blame : and if they in-
sist on all or nothing I can but offer them the
latter. Nevertheless, I must assert, for my
own satisfaction, that in many even of our most
imperial artists, in the brothers Spenser and the
brothers Nash, in Mr. Lewis, Mr. Roberts,
Mr. Bomberg, and Mr. Lamb, I discover
plenty of ability ; only I cannot help fancying
that they may have mistaken the nature of their
gifts. Were they really born to be painters ?
I wonder. But of this I am sure : their friends
merely make them look silly by comparing
them with contemporary French masters, or
even with Lionardo da Vinci.
192

WILCOXISM

Wilcoxism is a terrible disease because it
slowly but surely eats away our sense of im-
perfection, our desire for improvement, and our
power of self-criticism. Modesty and know-
ledge are the best antidotes ; and a treatment
much recommended by the faculty is to take
more interest in art and less in one's own
prestige. Above all, let us cultivate a sense of
proportion. Let us admire, for instance, the
admirable, though somewhat negative, qualities
in the work of Mr. Lewis — the absence of
vulgarity and false sentiment, the sobriety of
colour, the painstaking search for design —
without forgetting that in the Salon d'Automne
or the Salon des Independants a picture by him
would neither merit nor obtain from the most
generous critic more than a passing word of
perfunctory encouragement ; for in Paris there
are perhaps five hundred men and women —
drawn from the four quarters of the earth — all
trying to do what Mr. Lewis tries to do, and
doing it better.

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ART AND POLITICS

Mr. Roger Fry, by means of an instructive
tale (Athen<eum^ August 13, 1920), has shown
us that in their dealings with art Bolshevik
politicians remain true to type. Like the rest
of their breed, they have no use for it unless
they can exploit it to their own ends. For my
part, I was never so simple as to suppose that,
if the de facto government of Russia professed
admiration for Matisse and Picasso, that ad-
miration had anything to do with the artistic
gifts of either of these painters, any more than
that the respect with which the British Govern-
ment treats the names of Raphael and Michel
Angelo should be taken to imply that any single
one of His Majesty's ministers has ever ex-
perienced an aesthetic emotion. Consequently,
I was not at all surprised to learn that the sure,
though unconscious, taste of the statesman had
led the rulers of Russia to reject their first
loves; that instinctively they had divined that
both Matisse and Picasso were too much like
genuine artists to be trustworthy; and that
they had, therefore, transferred their affections
to the thin, and fundamentally academic, work
of Larionoff, which should, I fancy, be just
the thing for advanced politicians.

Some time ago, however, before Picasso was

found out, a young Russian aesthete — so Mr,

Fry tells us — was licensed by the competent

authority to pronounce that artist's eulogy, on

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ART AND POLITICS

the understanding, of course, that the lecture
should somehow serve as a stick wherewith to
beat the opposition. Nothing easier : Picasso
was pitted against Renoir. Picasso was a great
artist, because, abstract and austere, he was the
man for the proletariat ; whereas Renoir, who
painted pretty pictures for the bourgeoisie, was
no earthly good. The lecturer, as might have
been expected, was out even in his facts : for
Renoir — who came from the people, by the way
— might, were he less of an artist, by means or
the taking and almost anecdotic quality of his
earlier work, give some pleasure to a working
man ; whereas Picasso— the son of middle-class
parents, too — could not possibly win from an
honest labourer, left to himself, anything but
sarcastic laughter or ferocious abuse. But even
if true, the lecturer's facts would have been be-
side the point. To say that a work is aristo-
cratic or democratic, moral or immoral, is to say
something silly and irrelevant, or rather, silly
if meant to be relevant to its value as art. In
the work of Renoir and of Picasso, in all works
of art for that matter, the essential quality, as
every sensitive person knows, is the same.
Whatever it may be that makes art matter is
to be found in every work that does matter.
And though, no doubt, "subject" and to some
extent " attack " may be conditioned by an
artist's opinions and attitude to life, such things
are irrelevant to his work's final significance.
'95

ART AND POLITICS

Strange as it may seem, the essential quality
in a work of art is purely artistic. It has
nothing to do with the moral, religious, or
political views of its creator. It has to do solely
with his aesthetic experience and his power
of expressing that. But, as no politician is
capable of appreciating, or even becoming
aware of, this essential quality, it is perhaps only
natural that politicians should look elsewhere
for the significance of art.

This painful but certain fact once grasped,
it becomes possible to understand several things
that have considerably puzzled critics and his-
torians. For instance, it is often remarked,
and generally with surprise, that progressive
politicians are commonly averse to new move-
ments in art. The attitude of the present
Russian Government to the contemporary
movement makes neither for nor against this
view, for that novelty it took over as a going
concern. Let us see how it looks on the next,
which will be very likely a return to the tradi-
tion of Ingres. The example usually cited by
exponents of this theory — that progressive poli-
ticians are reactionary in art — is the notorious
hostility of Liberals to the romantic movement ;
but I believe that were they to study closely the
histories of the Impressionist, the Pre-Raphael-
ite, and the Wagnerian movements they would
find in them, too, evidence on the whole favour-
able to their case. Be that as it may, this theory,
196

ART AND POLITICS

which once seemed paradoxical, quite loses its
fantastic air when considered in the light of our
discovery. Had art anything to do with
opinion it would be strange, indeed, if new
art were ill-received by those who like their
opinions new. But as art has nothing what-
ever 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 tea.
The essential qualities of a work of art are
purely artistic ; and since politicians, if not too
coarse by nature, soon make themselves so by
practice, to apprehend these they must, unless
they can leave art alone, seek its significance
in what is unessential. Progressive politicians,
who have a way of taking ethics under their
wing and even conceive themselves the active
promoters of good, are apt to seek it in morals.
One might have supposed that a message was
to be found as easily in new forms of art as in old ;
but, unluckily, new forms are to most incom-
prehensible. And though to a hardened sinner
here and there what is incomprehensible may be
nothing worse than disconcerting, to him who
seeks good in all things, and is constantly on the
look-out for uplifting influences, whatever dis-
appoints this longing is positively and terribly
evil. Now, a new and genuine work of art
is something unmistakably alive and, at the
same time, unprovided, as yet, with moral
credentials. It is unintelligible without being
197

ART AND POLITICS

negligible. It comes from an unfamiliar world
and shakes a good man's belief in the obvious.
It must be very wicked. And the proper re-
action to what is wicked is a blind fury of moral
indignation. Well, blind fury is blind. So no
one could be much worse placed than the
political moralist for seeing whatever there may
be to be seen in what is, at once, strange and
subtle.

We are in a position now to clear up another
difficulty, 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 truth.
If art had anything to do with politics, evidently
art should have flourished most gloriously in
those ages of political freedom which do us all
so much credit. The necessity of this inference
has been felt strongly enough by Liberal his-
torians to make them accept without demur the
doctrine that the age of Pericles was the great
age of visual art, and repeat it without mention-
ing the fact that in that age an aristocracy_of
some twenty-five thousand citizens was sup-
ported by the compulsory labours of some four
hundred thousand slaves. The truth is, of
course, that art may flourish under any form of
government. It flourished in the Athenian
aristocracy and under the despotic bureau-
cracies of China, Persia, and Byzantium. In
the eleventh and twelfth centuries it flourished
under the feudal system, and in the fifteenth
198

ART AND POLITICS

amongst the oligarchies and tyrannies of Italy.
On the other hand, neither the Roman Re-
public .nor the Roman Empire gave us any-
thing much worth remembering : and no
period in French history has been less fruitful
in art and letters than the first republic and
empire. There was Ingres, of course ; but
the period on the whole was singularly barren,
and it may be just worth remarking that at no
time, perhaps, has French art been so academic,
professorial, timid, and uninspired as in the
first glorious years of the great Revolution.

Here there is nothing to surprise us. But
what does, at first sight, seem odd is that ajt
should apparently be indifferent, not only to
political systems, but to social conditions as
w^U. Barbarism or Civilization : it is all one
tp art. Old-fashioned historians, who had a
pleasant, tidy way of dealing with the past,
used to plot out from that wilderness four great
periods of civilization : the Athenian (from
480 B.C. to the death of Aristotle, 322), the
first and second centuries of the Roman Em-
pire, Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, and from the end of the Fronde, 1653,
to the Revolution. For my part, I should be
inclined to subtract from these the Roman
period, and add, if only I knew more about it,
the age of Sung. But accepting, by way of
compromise, all five, we find that three — the
Greek, Chinese, and Italian — were rich in
199

ART AND POLITICS

visual art, whereas Rome was utterly barren
and the eighteenth century not extraordinarily
prolific. To make matters worse, we see in the
dark and early middle ages a steady flow of first-
rate art from societies more or less barbarous,
while lately we have learnt that black and naked
savages can create exquisitely.

Are we, then, to assume that there is no con-
nection between art and civilization ? I think
not. A connection there is, but, as was to be
expected, an unessential one. The essential
quality in art is invariable, and what gives the
Parthenon its significance is what gives signific-
ance to a nigger's basket-work box. There is
such a thing as civilized art, but its civility
lies in adventitious and subsidiary qualities —
in the means, not in the end. It seems to me
we do mean something when we say that
Phidias, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, Raphael,
Racine, Moliere, Poussin, Milton, Wren, Jane
Austen and Mozart are highly civilized artists,
and that the creators of the Gothic cathedrals
and the author of the Chanson de Roland, Villon,
Webster, Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth,
Emily Bronte, Whitman, Turner, Wagner and
the Congolese fetish-makers are not. But,
whatever we may mean, assuredly we do not
mean that one set is superior to the other.
They differ widely ; but they differ in the
means by which they compass the same end.
It is absurd to argue that civilization is either
200

ART AND POLITICS

favourable or unfavourable to art ; but it is
reasonable to suppose that it may be the one
or the other to a particular artist. Different
temperaments thrive in different atmospheres.
How many mute, inglorious Miltons, Raphaels,
and Mozarts may not have lost heart and gone
under in the savage insecurity of the dark ages ?
And may not the eighteenth century, which
clipped the wings of Blake, have crushed
the fluttering aspirations of a dozen Gothically-
minded geniuses and laughed some budding
Wagner out of all idea of expressing his ebul-
lient personality ?

It is possible to speak of civilized- or un-
civilized art and mean something by our words ;
but what we mean has nothing to do with the
ultimate value of the work. And, in the same
way, there may be an unessential connection
between art and politics, though more remote
and unimportant still. As I have explained
too often already, an artist, before he can create
effectively, has got to work himself into a pas-
sion ; by some means he has got to raise his
feelings to the creative temperature and his
energies to a corresponding pitch of intensity.
He must make himself drunk somehow, and
political passion is as good a tipple as another.
Religion, Science, Morals, Love, Hate, Fear,
Lust — all serve the artist's turn, and Politics
and Patriotism have done their bit. It is
clear that Wordsworth was thrown into the
201

ART AND POLITICS

state of mind in which he wrote his famous
sonnets by love of England and detestation of
France, by fear of revolution and longing for
order ; but how much patriotism or constitu-
tionalism has to do with the suave beauty of
those harmonious masterpieces may be inferred
from the fact that " hoarse FitzGerald " and
Mr. Kipling are quite as patriotic and even
more reactionary. Amongst painters David
is the conspicuous example of an artist — a small
one, to be sure — intoxicated by politics. David
set out as a humble, eighteenth-century follower
of Fragonard. But the Revolution filled his
poor head with notions about the Greeks and
the Romans, Harmodius and Aristogiton,
Cornelia and the Gracchi, sic semper tyrannis,
and Phrygian caps. And his revolutionary en-
thusiasm changed the whole manner of his
attack on that central, artistic problem which
never, in any style, did he succeed in solving.
But the influence of this new style was immense,
and paramount in French painting for the next
forty or fifty years. It is to be noted, however,
that David's great and immediate follower, the
mighty Ingres, who frankly adopted this style,
redolent of all republican virtues, was himself
one of the most virulent reactionaries that ever
lived.

And that, perhaps, would be all that needed
saying about Art and Politics were it not that
at this moment the subject has an unusual im-

202

ART AND POLITICS

portance. Movements in art have, more often
than not, been the result of an extraordinarily
violent preoccupation, on the part of artists,
with the unessential and insignificant. David
rescued painting from the charming and slightly
sentimental disorder of the later eighteenth
century by concentrating on Roman virtues and
generals' uniforms. The Romantics freed
themselves from Davidism by getting frantic-
ally excited about a little hazy nonsense rather
unfairly attributed to Lord Byron and Sir
Walter Scott. From this the Impressionists
escaped by persuading themselves that they
were men of science. And against this my
contemporaries set up a conscious aestheticism,
slightly tinged with certain metaphysico-moral
doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and
the thing in itself. With Cubism conscious
aestheticism holds the field, for the Cubist
theory is, in the main, aesthetic. That is one
reason why I cannot think that there is any
great future for Cubism. An artistic move-
ment is unlikely to live long on anything so
relevant to art ; for artists, it seems, must be-
lieve that they are concerned with something
altogether different. Wherefore, I think it not
improbable — indeed, there are indications al-
ready * — that, political progress having in the
last few years somewhat outrun civilization,
and the new democracy being apparently hos-
* September 1920
303

ART AND POLITICS

tile to art and culture, artists will take to be-
lieving passionately in what they will call
" order." If so, in the name of Napoleon and
Louis XIV, but, let us hope, with the science
and restraint of Poussin and Ingres, they will
turn, most likely, to the classical tradition and,
while endeavouring to create significant form,
will assert vehemently that they are expressing
their political convictions.

204

DERA1N

(Photo : Bernheim jeune)

THE AUTHORITY OF
M. DERAIN

Sooner or later the critic who wishes to be taken
seriously must say his word about Derain. It
is an alarming enterprise. Not only does he
run a considerable risk of making himself ab-
surd, he may make a formidable and con-
temptuous enemy as well. " On ne peut pas
me laisser tranquille ! " grumbles Derain ; to
which the only reply I can think of is — " on ne
peut pas."

Derain is now the greatest power amongst
young French painters. I would like to lay
stress on the words " power " and " French,"
because I do not wish to say, what may never-
theless be true, that Derain is the greatest
painter in France, or seemingly to forget that
Picasso's is the paramount influence in Europe.
For all their abjurations most of the younger
and more intelligent foreigners, within and
without the gates of Paris, know well enough
that Picasso is still their animator. Wherever
a trace of Cubism or of tete-de-ntgre^ or of that
thin, anxious line of the " blue period " is still
to be found, there the ferment of his unquiet
spirit is at work. And I believe it is in revolt
against, perhaps in terror of, this profoundly un-
French spirit that the younger Frenchmen are
seeking shelter and grace under the vast though
unconscious nationalism of Derain.

For the French have never loved Cubism,
205

THE AUTHORITY OF M. DERAIN

though Braque uses it beautifully. How
should they love anything so uncongenial to
their temperament ? How should that race
which above all others understands and revels
in life care for an art of abstractions ? How,
having raised good sense to the power of genius,
should France quite approve aesthetic fanati-
cism ? What would Poussin have said to so
passionate a negation of common sense ?
Well, happily, we know the opinion of Moliere :

La parfaite raison fuit toute extremite,
' Et veut que Ton soit sage avec sobri&e.

Did ever Frenchmen sympathize absolutely
with Don Quixote ? At any rate, because at
the very base of his civilization lies that mar-
vellous sense of social relations and human
solidarity, a French artist will never feel en-
tirely satisfied unless he can believe that his
art is somehow related to, and justified by, Life.
Now, Picasso is not Spanish for nothing.
He is a mystic ; which, of course, does not pre-
vent him being a remarkably gay and compe-
tent man of the world. Amateurs who knew
him in old days are sometimes surprised to find
Picasso now in a comfortable flat or staying at
the Savoy. I should not be surprised to hear
of him in a Kaffir kraal or at Buckingham
Palace, and wherever he might be I should
know that under that urbane and slightly
quizzical surface still would be kicking and

THE AUTHORITY OF M. DERAIN

struggling the tireless problem. That pro-
blem his circumstances cannot touch. It has
nothing to do with Life ; 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 him, I mean — but never would it occur
to him that a line could be right in any other
way. For him Life proves nothing and signi-
fies not much ; it is the raw material of art.
His problem is within ; 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 God. Derain's pro-
blem is different, and perhaps more exacting
still.

It seems odd, I know, 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 pictures. Partly this may be because
his pictures are not much to be seen ; for he is
neither prolific not particularly diligent, and
always there are half a dozen hungry dealers
waiting to snap up whatever he may contrive to
finish. But clearly this is not explanation
enough, and to appreciate Derain's position in
Paris one should be, what unluckily I am not,
a psychologist. One should be able to under-
stand why his pictures are imitated hardly at
all, and why his good opinion is coveted ; why
young painters want to know what Derain
thinks and feels, not only about their art, but
207

THE AUTHORITY OF M. DERAIN

about art in general, and even about life ; and
why instinctively they pay him this compliment
of supposing that he does not wish them simply
to paint as he paints. What is it Derain wants
of them ? I shall be satisfied, and a good deal
surprised, if I can discover even what he wants
of himself.

A year or two ago it was the fashion to insist
on Derain 's descent from the Italian Primitives :
I insisted with the rest. But as he matures
his French blood asserts more and more its
sovranty, and now completely dominates the
other elements in his art. Assuredly he is in
the great European tradition, but specifically
he is of the French : Chardin, Watteau, and
Poussin are his direct ancestors. Of Poussin
no one who saw La Boutique Fantasque will
have forgotten how it made one think. No
one will have forgotten the grave beauty of
those sober greys, greens, browns, and blues.
They made one think of Poussin, and of Racine,
too. And yet the ballet was intensely modern ;
always you were aware that Derain had been
right through the movement — through Fauv-
ism, Negroism, Cubism. Here was an artist
who had refused nothing and feared nothing.
Could anyone be less of a reactionary and at
the same time less of an anarchist ? And, I
will add, could anyone be less gavroche ? La
Boutique Fantasque, which is not only the most
amusing, but the most beautiful, of Russian
208

THE AUTHORITY OF M. DERAIN

ballets, balances on a discord. Even the fun
of Derain is not the essentially modern fun of
Massine. Derain is neither flippant nor ex-
asperated ; he is humorous, and tragic sometimes.

English criticizm is puzzled by Derain be-
cause very often it is confronted by things of
his which seem dull and commonplace, to
English critics. These are, in fact, the pro-
tests of Derain's genius against his talent, and
whether they are good or not I cannot say.
Derain has a super-natural gift for making
things : give him a tin kettle and in half a
morning he will hammer you out a Summerian
head ; he has the fingers of a pianist, an apti-
tude that brings beauty to life with a turn of
the wrist ; in a word, that sensibility of touch
which keeps an ordinary craftsman happy for a
lifetime : and these things terrify him. He
ties both hands behind his back and fights so.
Deliberately he chooses the most common-
place aspects and the most unlovely means of
expression, hoping that, talent thus bound,
genius will be stung into action. Sometimes,
no doubt, Achilles stays sulking in his tent.
I suppose Derain can be dull.

But what does he want this genius of his to
do ? Nothing less, I believe, than what the
French genius did at its supreme moment, in
the seventeenth century, what the Greek did
in the fifth. My notion is that he wants to
create art which shall be perfectly uncom-
209 o

THE AUTHORITY OF M. DERAIN

promising and at the same time human, and
he would like it none the worse, I dare say,
were it to turn out popular as well. After all,
Racine did this, and Moliere and La Bruyere
and Watteau and Chardin and Renoir. It is
in the French tradition to believe that there
is a beauty common to life and art. The
Greeks had it, so runs the argument, and the
Italians of the high renaissance, but the English
poets tended to sacrifice art to beauty, and
the moderns — so Derain may think — sacrifice
beauty and grandeur to discretion. The motto
" Safety first " did, I will confess, just float
across my eyes as I walked through the last
salon d'automne. And, then, Derain may feel
that there is in him something besides his
power of creation and sense of form, something
which philosophers would call, I dare say, a
sense of absolute beauty in things, of external
harmony. However we may call it, what I
mean is the one thing at all worth having
which the Greeks had and the Byzantines had
not, which Raphael possesses more abundantly
than Giotto. In Derain this sense is alive and
insistent ; it is urging him always to capture
something that is outside him ; the question is,
can he, without for one moment compromising
the purity of his art, obey it ? I do not know.
But if he cannot, then there is no man alive to
give this age what Phidias, Giorgione, and
Watteau gave theirs.

210

THE AUTHORITY OF M. DERAIN

The French are not unwilling to believe that
they are the heirs of Greece and Rome. So,
if I am right, the extraordinary influence of
Derain may be accounted for partly, at any rate,
by the fact that he, above all living Frenchmen,
has the art to mould, in the materials of his age,
a vessel that might contain the grand classical
tradition. What is more, it is he, if anyone,
who has the strength to fill it. No one who
ever met him but was impressed by the prodi-
gious force of his character and his capacity for
standing alone. At moments he reminds one
oddly of Johnson. He, too, is a dictator, at
once humorous and tragic like the mirific
doctor, but, unlike him, infinitely subtle. He,
too, is troubled, and not by any sense of isola-
tion nor yet by the gnawings of vanity and small
ambition. It is the problem that tortures him.
Can he do what Raphael and Racine did ?
Can he create something that shall be uncom-
promising as art and at the same time humane ?

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 tradition, a
longing for order and the will to win it, and
that mysterious thing which the Athenians
called a-TrovSioTw and schoolmasters call " high
seriousness." He accepts the age into which
he has stumbled with all its nastiness, vulgarity,
and cheek. He accepts that woebegone,
modern democracy which could not even make
211

THE AUTHORITY OF M. DERAIN

its great war fine. He believes he can make
something of it. Because he has a first-rate
intellect he can afford to mistrust reason ; and
so sure is he of his own taste that he can brush
refinement aside. Yet neither his scepticisms
nor his superstitions alienate the intelligent, nor
are the sensitive offended by his total disregard
of their distinctions. And though all this has
nothing to do with painting, on painters, I
surmise, it has its effect.

212

"PLUS DE JAZZ"*

On the first night of the Russian ballet in
Paris, somewhere about the middle of May,
perhaps the best painter in France, one of the
best musicians, and an obscure journalist were
sitting in a small bistrot on the Boulevard St.
Germain. They should all have been at the
spectacle ; all had promised to go ; and yet
they sat on over their alcools and bocks^ and
instead of going to the ballet began to abuse it.
And from the ballet they passed to modern
music in general, and from music to literature :
till gradually into the conversation came, above
the familiar note of easy denigration, a note
of energy, of conviction, of aspiration, which
so greatly astonished one, at least, of the three
that, just before two o'clock — the hour at
which the patron puts even his most faithful
clients out of doors — he exclaimed, with an
emphasis in him uncommon, " Plus de Jazz 1 "
It was the least important of the three who
said it, and, had it been the most, I am not
suggesting that, like the walls of Jericho, a
movement would have tottered at an ejacula-
tion. Jazz will not die because a few clever
people have discovered that they are getting
sick of it ; Jazz is dying, and the conversation
to which I have referred is of importance only
as an early recognition of the fact. For the
rest it was unjust, as such conversations will be ;
* 1921
213

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

the Jazz movement, short and slightly irritating
though it was, having served its turn and added
its quota to the tradition. But Jazz is dead —
or dying, at any rate — and the moment has
come for someone who likes to fancy himself
wider awake than his fellows to write its
obituary notice. In doing so he may, ad-
ventitiously, throw light on something more
interesting than the past ; he may adumbrate
the outline of the coming movement. For
always movements are conditioned partly by
their predecessors, against which, in some sort,
they must ever be reactions.

The Jazz movement is a ripple on a wave ;
the wave — the large movement which began at
the end of the nineteenth century in a reaction
against realism and scientific paganism — still
goes forward. The wave is essentially the move-
ment which one tends to associate, not very
accurately perhaps, with the name of Cezanne :
it has nothing to do with Jazz ; its most
characteristic manifestation is modern painting,
which, be it noted, Jazz had left almost un-
touched. " Picasso ? " queries someone. I shall
come to Picasso presently. The great modern
painters — Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard,
Friesz, Braque, etc. — were firmly settled on their
own lines of development before ever Jazz was
heard of: only the riff-raff* has been affected.
Italian Futurism is the nearest approach to a
pictorial expression of the Jazz spirit.
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" PLUS DE JAZZ "

The movement bounced into the world some-
where about the year 1911. It was headed by
a Jazz band and a troupe of niggers, dancing.
Appropriately it took its name from music —
the art that is always behind the times. Gav-
roche was killed on the barricades, and it was
with his name that Jazz should have been
associated. Impudence is its essence — im-
pudence in quite natural and legitimate revolt
against nobility and beauty : impudence which
finds its technical equivalent in syncopation :
impudence which rags. " The Ragtime move-
ment " would have been the better style, but
the word " Jazz " has passed into at least
three languages, and now we must make the
best of it.

After impudence comes the determination
to surprise: you shall not be gradually moved
to the depths, you shall be given such a start
as makes you jigger all over. And from this
determination issues the grateful corollary —
thou shalt not be tedious. The best Jazz
artists are never long-winded. In their ad-
mirable and urbane brevity they remind one
rather of the French eighteenth century. But
surprise is an essential ingredient. An accom-
plished Jazz artist, whether in notes or words,
will contrive, as a rule, to stop just where
you expected him to begin. Themes and
ideas are not to be developed ; to say all one
has to say smells of the school, and may be
215

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

a bore, and — between you and me — a " give-
away " to boot. Lastly, it must be admitted
there is a typically modern craving for small
profits and quick returns. Jazz art is soon
created, soon liked, and soon forgotten. It is
the movement of masters of eighteen ; and these
masterpieces created by boys barely escaped
from college can be appreciated by the youngest
Argentine beauty at the Ritz. Jazz is very
young : like short skirts, it suits thin, girlish
legs, but has a slightly humiliating effect on
grey hairs. Its fears and dislikes — for instance,
its horror of the noble and the beautiful —
are childish ; and so is its way of expressing
them. Not by irony and sarcasm, but by
jeers and grimaces does Jazz mark its anti-
pathies. Irony and wit are for the grown-ups.
Jazz dislikes them as much as it dislikes nobility
and beauty. They are the products of the
cultivated intellect, and Jazz cannot away with
intellect or culture. Niggers can be admired
artists without any gifts more singular than
high spirits ; so why drag in the intellect ?
Besides, to bring intellect into art is to invite
home a guest who is apt to be inquisitive and
even impartial. Intellect in Jazz circles is
treated rather as money was once in polite
society — it is taken for granted. Nobility,
beauty, and intellectual subtlety are alike ruled
out : the first two are held up to ridicule, the
last is simply abused. What Jazz wants are
216

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

romps and fun, and to make fun ; that is why,
as I have said, its original name Ragtime was
the better. At its best Jazz rags every thing.
The inspiration of Jazz is the same as that
of the art of the grand siecle. Everyone knows
how in the age of Louis XIV artists found in
la bonne com-pagnie their standards, their critics,
and many of their ideas. It was by studying
and writing for this world that Racine, Moliere,
and Boileau gave an easier and less professional
gait to French literature, which — we should
not forget — during its most glorious period
was conditioned and severely limited by the
tastes and prejudices of polite society. Whether
the inventors of Jazz thought that, in their
pursuit of beauty and intensity, the artists of
the nineteenth century had strayed too far from
the tastes and interests of common but well-to-
do humanity I. know not, but certain it is that,
like Racine and Moliere, and unlike Beaude-
laire and Mallarme and Ce'sar Franck, they
went to la bonne compagnie for inspiration and
support. La bonne compagnie they found in
the lounges of great hotels, on transatlantic
liners, in wagons-fits, in music-halls, and in
expensive motor-cars and restaurants. La bonne
compagnie was dancing one-steps to ragtime
music. This, they said, is the thing. The
artists of the nineteenth century had found
la bonne compagnie — the rich, that is to say —
dancing waltzes to sentimental Olgas and
217

41 PLUS DE JAZZ "

Blue Danubes, but they had drawn quite other
conclusions. Yet waltzes and waltz-tunes are
just as good as, and no better than, fox-trots
and ragtime. Both have their merits ; but it
is a mistake, perhaps, for artists to take either
seriously.

Be that as it may, the serious artists of the
nineteenth century never dreamed of supposing
that the pleasures of the rich were the proper
stuff of art ; so it was only natural that the
twentieth should go to the hotel lounges for
inspiration. And, of course, it was delightful
for those who sat drinking their cocktails and
listening to nigger-bands to be told that, be-
sides being the jolliest people on earth, they
were the most sensitive and critically gifted.
They, along with the children and savages
whom in so many ways they resembled, were
the possessors of natural, uncorrupted taste.
They first had appreciated ragtime and sur-
rendered themselves to the compelling qualities
of Jazz. Their instinct might be trusted :
so, no more classical concerts and music-
lessons ; no more getting Lycidas by heart ;
no more Baedeker ; no more cricking one's
neck in the Sistine Chapel : 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 noble, pompous,
and fraudulent. And it was delightful, too,
for people without a vestige of talent — and
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" PLUS DE JAZZ "

even then these were in the majority — people
who could just strum a tune or string a few
lines of doggerel, to be told that all that dis-
tinguishes what used to be called " serious art "
from their productions was of no consequence
whatever, and that, on the contrary, it was these,
if any, that ought to be taken seriously. The
output of verse, which was manifestly much too
easy to write and difficult to read, went up
suddenly by leaps and bounds. What is
more, some of it got printed : publishers, and
even editors, bowed the knee. Naturally, the
movement was a success at the Ritz and in
Grub Street, Mayfair. On the other hand,
because to people who reflected for an instant
it seemed highly improbable that fox-trotters
and shimmy-shakers were sensitive or interest-
ing people, that Christy Minstrels were great
musicians, or that pub-crawlers and demi-
mondaines were poets, there sprang simultane-
ously into existence a respectable, intelligent,
and ill-tempered opposition which did, and
continues to do, gross injustice to the genuine
artists who have drawn inspiration, or susten-
ance at any rate, from Jazz.

During the last ten years Jazz had dominated
music and coloured literature : on painting, as
I have said, its effect has been negligible.
What, for want of a better name, I must call
the Cezanne movement was too profound a
stream to be modified by so shallow a current.
219

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

All the great contemporary painters are ex-
tremely serious ; they make no faces at their
predecessors, or at anyone else. They are not
gavroche. Surprise is the last emotion they wish
to arouse. And, assuredly, they have neither
gone to the hotel-loungers for inspiration nor
shown the slightest desire to amuse them. This
is as true of Picasso as of Derain : only, Picasso's
prodigious inventiveness may sometimes give
the impression of a will to surprise, while
his habit of turning everything to account
certainly does lead him to cast an inquisitive
eye on every new manifestation of vitality. I
have seen him enthusiastic over la politique
Lloyd-George, and I should not be in the least
surprised if he found something in it to serve
some one or other of his multifarious purposes.
If, however, surprise were what Picasso aimed
at he could go a very much easier way about it.
He could do what his tenth-rate imitators try
to do — for instance, he could agreeably shock
the public with monstrous caricatures and
cubist photography — those pictures, I mean,
which the honest stockbroker recognizes, with
a thrill of excitement at his own cleverness,
as his favourite picture-postcards rigged out to
look naughty. But Picasso shows such ad-
mirable indifference to the public that you
could never guess from his pictures that such
a thing existed : and that, of course, is how it
should be. He never startles for the sake of

220

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

startling ; neither does he mock. Certainly,
unlike the best of his contemporaries, he seems
almost as indifferent to the tradition as he
is to the public ; but he no more laughs at the
one than he tries to startle the other. Only
amongst the whipper-snappers of painting will
you discover a will to affront tradition, or at-
tract attention by deliberate eccentricity. Only,
I think, the Italian Futurists, their transalpine
apes, a few revolutionaries on principle, but
especially the Futurists with their electric-lit
presentation of the more obvious peculiarities
of contemporary life and their taste for popular
actualities can be said definitely to have at-
tempted a pictorial expression of Jazz.

On music, however, and literature its in-
fluence has been great, and here its triumphs
are considerable. It is easy to say that the
genius of Stravinsky — a musician, unless I
mistake, of the first order and in the great line
— rises superior to movements. To be sure
it does : so does the genius of Moliere. But
just as the genius of Moliere found its appro-
priate food in one kind of civilization, so does
the genius of Stravinsky in another ; and with
that civilization his art must inevitably be
associated. Technically, too, he has been in-
fluenced much by nigger rhythms and nigger
methods. He has composed ragtimes. So,
if it is inexact to say that Stravinsky writes Jazz,
it is true to say that his genius has been
221

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

nourished by it. Also, he sounds a note of
defiance, and sometimes, I think, does evince
a will to insult. That he surprises and startles
is clear ; what is more, 1 believe he means to
do it : but tricks of self-advertisement are, of
course, beneath so genuine an artist. No more
than Picasso does he seek small profits or quick
returns ; on the contrary, he casts his bread
upon the waters with a finely reckless gesture.
The fact is, Stravinsky is too big to be covered
by a label ; 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 artist.
Similarly, it may claim Mr. T. S. 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 muse.
Midwifery, to be sure, seems an odd occupa-
tion for a lady whom one pictures rather in the
role of a flapper : but a midwife was what
the poet needed, and in that capacity she has
served him. Apparently it is only by adopting
a demurely irreverent attitude, by being primly
insolent, and by playing the devil with the in-
strument of Shakespeare and Milton that Mr.
Eliot is able occasionally to deliver himself of
one of those complicated and remarkable
imaginings of his : apparently it is only in
language of an exquisite purity so far as
material goes, but twisted and ragged out of

222

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

easy recognition, that these nurslings can be
swathed. As for surprise, that, presumably,
is an emotion which the author of Ara Vos Prec
is not unwilling to provoke. Be that as it may,
Mr. Eliot is about the best of our living poets,
and, like Stravinsky, he is as much a product of
the Jazz movement as so good an artist can be
of any.

In literature Jazz manifests itself both
formally and in content. Formally its distinc-
tive characteristic is the familiar one — synco-
pation. It has given us a ragtime literature
which flouts traditional rhythms and sequences
and grammar and logic. 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 read. Eliot is too personal to be
typical of anything, 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 Cendrars. In prose I think Mr. Joyce will
serve as a, perhaps, not very good example :
I choose him because he is probably better
known to readers than any other writer who
affects similar methods. In his later publica-
tions Mr. Joyce does deliberately go to work
to break up the traditional sentence, throwing
overboard sequence, syntax, and, indeed, most
of those conventions which men habitually
223

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

employ for the exchange of precise ideas.
Effectually, and with a will, he rags the literary
instrument : unluckily, this will has at its service
talents which though genuine are moderate only.
A writer of greater gifts, Virginia Woolf, has
lately developed a taste for playing tricks with
traditional constructions. Certainly she " leaves
out " with the boldest of them : here is synco-
pation if you like it. I am not sure that I do.
At least, 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 prose. But, indeed, I do not think
of Mrs. Woolf as belonging properly to the
movement ; she is not imbued with that spirit
which inspires the authentic Jazz writers,
whether of verse that looks oddly like prose
or of prose that raises a false hope of turning
out to be verse, and conditions all that they
produce. She is not gavroche. In her writ-
ings I find no implicit, and often well-merited,
jeer at accepted ideas of what prose and verse
should be and what they should be about ;
no nervous dislike of traditional valuations, of
scholarship, culture, and intellectualism ; above
all, no note of protest against the notion that
one idea or emotion can be more important or
significant than another. Assuredly, Mrs.
Woolf is not of the company on whose banner
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" PLUS DE JAZZ "

is inscribed " No discrimination ! " *' No cul-
ture ! " " Not much thought ! " She is not
of that school whose grand object it is to pre-
sent, as surprisingly as possible, the chaos of
any mind at any given moment.

The Jazz theory of art, if theory there be,
seems stupid enough — as do most. What
matters, however, are not theories, but works :
so what of the works of Jazz ? If Stravinsky
is to be claimed for the movement, Jazz has its
master : it has also its petits maltres — Eliot,
Cendrars, Picabia, and Joyce, for instance, and
les six. Oddly enough, les six consist of four
musicians — Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric,
Poulenc, and Germaine Taillefer* — chaperoned
by the brilliant Jean Cocteau. All five have
their places in contemporary civilization : and
such talents are not to be disposed of simply by
the present of a bad name. For it is not enough
to call an artist " extremist " or " reactionary,"
"Cubist" or "Impressionist," and condemn
or approve him as such. These classifications
are merely journalistic or, if you will, archaeo-
logical conveniences. It is the critic's business
to inquire not so much whether an artist is
" advanced " or " Cubist " or " Jazz," as
whether he is good, bad, or interesting ; and
that is what most critics fail to do. One's
general opinion of a movement or school ought
not to affect one's opinion of any particular

* Honegger, I think, was never officially of the band.
225 P

!' PLUS DE JAZZ "

work. One may, for excellent reasons, dis-
like a movement ; one may hold that it hampers
or sets on a false scent more artists than it
serves ; that it induces students of promise to
waste time and energy on fruitless problems ;
that it generally fails to get the best out of its
most gifted adherents, while it pumps into a
multitude of empty heads so much hot air as to
swell them to disquieting proportions. This is
pretty much what I think of Cubism ; but I
am not such a fool as to deny that, experiment-
ing in these very problems which seem to me
to lead most artists into a rather unprofitable
world of abstractions, Picasso and Braque have
produced works of the greatest beauty and
significance, while those of Fernand Leger,
Jean Metsinger, and other avowed Cubists are
of extraordinary merit and deserve the most
careful attention. I can think of no move-
ment except that called "Art nouveau," which
has not contributed something to the world's
artistic capital and to the great tradition. Only,
to realize this, one must be able to distinguish
not only between movements, but between the
artists of a movement. That is what angry
critics will not do. That is why the admirable
Mr. Dent — whose brilliant lacerations of les six,
and other exponents of Jazz, I sometimes have
the pleasure of translating to his victims — knew
no better, the other day, than to bracket
Poulenc with Miss Edith Sitwell. Confusions
226

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

of this sort seem to me to take the sting out of
criticism ; and that, I am sure, is the last thing
Mr. Dent would wish to do. He, at any rate,
who comes to bury Jazz should realize what
the movement has to its credit, viz., one great
musician, one considerable poet, ten or a dozen
charming or interesting little masters and
mistresses, and a swarm of utterly fatuous
creatures who in all good faith believe them-
selves artists.

The encouragement given to fatuous ignor-
ance to swell with admiration of its own in-
competence is perhaps what has turned most
violently so many intelligent and sensitive
people against Jazz. They see that it en-
courages thousands of the stupid and vulgar
to fancy that they can understand art, and
hundreds of the conceited to imagine that they
can create it. All the girls in the " dancings "
and sportsmen at the bar who like a fox-trot or
a maxixe have been given to believe, by people
who ought to know better, that they are more
sensitive to music than those who prefer
Beethoven. The fact that Stravinsky wants
his music to be enjoyed in the cafe's gives pub- -
loafers fair ground for supposing that Stravin-
sky respects their judgement. Well, the
music of Brahms is not enjoyed by pub-loafers ;
but formerly the concert-goers were allowed
to know better. Stravinsky is reported to have
said that he would like people to be eating,
227

11 PLUS DE JAZZ "

drinking, and talking while his music was being
played (how furious he would be if they did
anything of the sort!), so, 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 ridiculous. Again : if rules were
made by pedants for pedants, must not mere
lawlessness be a virtue ? And, since savages
think little and know less, and since savage art
has been extolled by the knowing ones (I take
my share of whatever blame may be going)
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 Milton,
Spenser, and Gray ? Above all, because it has
been said that the intellect has nothing to do
with art, it is assumed by the mob of ladies and
gentlemen, who if they wrote not with ease
could not write at all, that there is no such thing
as the artistic problem. And it is, I believe,
chiefly because all genuine artists are beginning
to feel more and more acutely the need of a
severe and exacting problem, and because
everyone who cares seriously for art feels the
need of severe critical standards, that, with a
sigh of relief, people are timidly murmuring to
each other " Plus de Jazz ! "

And, indeed, there are autumnal indications :
the gay -papier-mache pagoda is beginning to
228

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

lose its colours : visibly it is wilting. When,
a few days after the conversation I have re-
corded, it was rumoured in Paris that the ad-
mired Prokofieff, composer of Chout, had said
that he detested ragtime, 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 par-
lours and vicarage gardens when Professor
Huxley began pouring cold water on Noah's
Ark. We hurried away to the Southern
Syncopated Orchestra, only to find it sadly
fallen off. But had it really changed so much
as we ? And, more and more, immense
musical and literary activity notwithstanding,
people are looking to the painters, with their
high seriousness, professionalism, conscience,
reverence, and vitality as the sole exponents
and saviours of " le grand art." Not for
nothing is Derain the most admired of French-
men by the young elite ; for Derain is humorous
without being gavroche, respects the tradition
yet is subservient to no school, and believes
that all the highest human faculties are not
more than sufficient to the production of the
smallest work of art.

What the pick of the new generation in
France, and in England too^ I fancy, is begin-
ning to feel is that art, though it need never be
solemn, must always be serious ; that it is a
matter of profound emotion and of intense
229

" PLUS DE JAZZ "

and passionate thought ; and that these things
are rarely found in dancing-palaces and hotel
lounges. Even to understand art a man must
make a great intellectual effort. One thing is
not as good as another ; so artists and amateurs
must learn to choose. No easy matter that :
discrimination of this sort being something
altogether different from telling a Manhattan
from a Martini. To select as an artist or dis-
criminate as a critic are needed feeling and
intellect and — most distressing of all — study.
However, unless I mistake, the effort will be
made. The age of easy acceptance of the
first thing that comes is closing. Thought
rather than spirits is required, quality rather
than colour, knowledge rather than irreticence,
intellect rather than singularity, wit rather than
romps, precision rather than surprise, dignity
rather than impudence, and lucidity above all
things : plus de Jazz. Meanwhile, whether
the ladies and gentlemen in the restaurants will
soon be preferring sentimental waltz-tunes to
flippant ragtimes is a question on which I can-
not pretend to an opinion. Neither does it
matter. What these people like or dislike has
nothing to do with art. That is the discovery.

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