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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 swaying, struggling, ravenous creatures. The howling is terrific. But Picasso himself is already 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. Obviously 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 emotion, others by the incandescence of intellectual passion. These go forward by intense concentration 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, 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.

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 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 complaining 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 exquisite 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 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. L?once Rosenberg's gallery no amateur fails to spot the Picassos. His choice of colours, the appropriateness of his most astonishing audacities, the disconcerting yet delightful 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 doctrinaire, 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 reduced to bare essentials by a process which implies 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 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.

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 be 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.

And so we get a school of lenient criticism which takes account of an appeal to life, provided that appeal be to universal experience and be made by purely aesthetic means. According to this theory we can be moved aesthetically by references to universal experience implicit in certain arrangements of line and colour, always provided that such references are expressions of the artist's peculiar emotion, and not mere comments on life and history or statements of fact or opinion. These by everyone 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 appreciate Sung painting one must make oneself familiar with the later developments of Buddhist metaphysics as modified by Taoist mysticism.

But it was not around such questions as these, vexatious, no doubt, but pertinent, that controversy raged. The questions that eminent 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 questions 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 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 become quite insignificant. Most of us know next to nothing about Buddhism and Totemism, and only a little about Greek myths and Byzantine 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 intelligible 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.

Every now and then we hear eloquent appeals 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 economy be insufficient to restrain them from paying this last insult to art, they will still find me waiting for them with a practical suggestion. Any student proposing to educate himself as a critic should be compelled to devote the first years of his course to the criticism of non-representative 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 art. And until he knows his way about that world he would do well to express no opinion on the merits of pictures and statues.

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 C?zanne, 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. L?on 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 reproductions at the end of the volume.

What M. Werth would say to the distinction implied in my last paragraph I cannot tell; but I am sure it is important. Certainly, behind 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 beautifully 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 subject, and from its author, too. And this is all-important because it is just this independent life of its own that gives to a work of art its peculiar character and 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 vaporous 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 coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height. And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that the picture carries a delightful overtone--that it is witty, whimsical, fantastic.

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 appreciated 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 surprise 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 beneath trees, fruits, crockery, leafage, the movements 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 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 implicitly. 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 painstaking 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 is unlike this shy, fastidious spirit that M. L?on Werth, by a brilliant stroke of sympathetic intelligence, has contrived to catch and hold for an instant.

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 unobtrusive. 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 acquainted with his work.

Duncan Grant is the best English painter alive. And how English he is! Of course, he has been influenced by C?zanne 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, Gainsborough, 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. 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 movement, became the student of C?zanne, 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 learning. He has learnt. He can now express, not someone else's ideas, but himself, completely 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 naturally 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 intelligent. His intellect is strong enough to keep in hand that most charming and unruly 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.

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 , 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 significant 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 conception, 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 painters have had enough sensibility of inspiration to make them distinguished 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 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 exhibition.

An Englishman who is an artist can hardly help being a poet; I neither applaud nor altogether 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 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 adscititious 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.

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 abandoned 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 apostolically 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 commendable; for the Trocadero collections being, unlike the British, mediocre both in quantity and quality, it was he who put the most sensitive 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 inclined 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 compare it with the art of the supreme Chinese periods , 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 compare it with Romanesque and early Italian ; 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 , 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, 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 anything 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, because 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 exquisite taste and sense of quality and their unsurpassed 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 delicacy in the artist's sense of relief and modelling is here implied! What tireless industry and patience! 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 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 intelligent 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 lifeless 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-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions. Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all are here; but profundity of vision is not. And because they cannot grasp complicated 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 making 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 handling 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 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 disposed to believe that anyone knows more. I am aware that certain amateurs think to enhance the value of their collections by conferring dates on their choicer specimens; I can understand why dealers encourage them in this vanity; and, seeing that they go to the collectors 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. 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, empires, 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 impossible 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 , 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, 10th century" evinces a perhaps exaggerated confidence in our gullibility.

Whenever these artists may have flourished it seems they flourish no more. The production 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 possess--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, internal 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 resembled 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, individualistic 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 ornament, has destroyed not only popular art but popular taste, has merely isolated the self-conscious artist and the critical appreciator; and the nineteenth century , which ruined the crafts, in painting 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 admiration. 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 sculpture: you may like it or dislike it, but at any rate you have no inducement to judge it on anything but its merits.

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 agreeable frivolity he must be prepared for contradiction: some people will have it that it 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 d?livrera des Grecs et des Romains?

Whoever may have rescued European painting 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 C?zanne. Forms and colours must be so organized as to compose coherent and self-supporting wholes; that is the central conviction which has inspired the art of the last twenty years. Order: that has been the watchword; 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 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 C?zanne or by Picasso. What could be more orderly? Cubism is nothing but the extreme manifestation of this passion for order, for the complete organization 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.

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, which, even in the darkest days of early Victorianism, saved French painting from falling into the pit of stale vulgarity out of which English has hardly yet crawled. French revolutions 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 preeminence of his country, question the sufficiency of Poussin and the perfection of Racine, or conceive 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 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 discovered 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.

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 no part of my business; but as it has profoundly 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 expression. 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, but for aesthetic. Stick to the rules, not because 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 is!" Many a foreigner would pay handsomely to have as much said of him.

In violent opposition to most of what surrounds 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 adventurous, 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 becomes an outlaw. He grows by kicking; 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.

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