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 comparatively 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 massive or surprising figures as those of Rabelais, La Fontaine, Poussin, Rousseau, Flaubert, Cezanne—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 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. Therefore 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 remained so long the centre of civilization.

One commonly deplored consequence of French conventionality is that it makes Frenchmen incapable of well understanding or appreciating 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 imperfect 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 discovered, what we in England are only too familiar with, the aesthetic possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good. Dostoevsky 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 worse, they take for such their own conventions. To read a French critic on Shakespeare or Ibsen or Dostoevsky or Goethe is generally a 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. Rather it seems to him ludicrous that books should be written in any language but his own; 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 conventional 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 confidence in Kipling and Chesterton, have become a standing joke abroad. There is no great reason why the French should know anything 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 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 remarks. 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 consequences of conventionality: and French conventionality is, in its turn, the inevitable consequence of a civilization so gracious and attractive that even the most lawless of its children cannot bear to appear disloyal.



MARQUET [P]

[Footnote P: Marquet. Par George Besson.]

The best picture by Marquet I ever saw was in the Grafton Gallery exhibition of 1912. It represented a naked woman sitting in a rocking-chair. Since then I have seen scores of things by him, admirable, as a rule, and invariably 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 anything 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 disquieting intensity by bold simplifications and distortion, by concentration on the vital movements 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 memes preoccupations que devant un bec 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 place beside those of no matter what contemporary.

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 l'ironie parfois atteint a la cruaute! Et quand, tous les usages admis qui veulent qu'on ne presente un homme que sous ses bons cotes, quand l'amitie meme que j'eprouve pour M. Marquet m'eussent engage, a me taire, un devoir plus imperieux me sollicitait, et j'aurais eu le sentiment de me rabaisser moi-meme 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 l'admiration des hommes puisqu'il a ete sans pitie."

The cry of this soft and silly sentimentalist has been neatly put by M. Besson to the purpose of illustrating, and perhaps a little exaggerating, the merits of a painter who is, assuredly, neither one nor the other. Too clever by half, that rather is the fault with which Marquet must be taxed. The artist who has 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. Always this brisk and agile person is stepping forward in front of the artist and jotting down his neat symbols in the space reserved for significant form. The landscapes and boats and street-scenes of Marquet, with their joyously emphatic statement, their lively contrasts, 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 St. Michel almost as often as Marquet has knocked them off. And if Pissarro never invented 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 woebegone gas-jet did he feel that whimpering, simpering, sentiment that Tolstoy frankly admired and Philippe felt the want of. But always 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 petticoats 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 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 Gerome fit heritiere de ses uniformes et qui devint la muse d'un geometre-arpenteur de certaine recente peinture." (Whom can he mean?)

Je connais l'atelier de Marquet, Madame, en marge de l'Atelier ou l'on esthetise, ou l'on fabrique les manifestes et les novateurs de genie. Marquet garde son role de peintre. Il n'est guere pour lui de souci plus serieux que le souci de sa liberte. Il veut etre libre pour peindre, libre meme pour oublier la peinture, libre encore, libre davantage pour n'etre ni questionne ni consulte, pour ne devenir ni un expert, ni un educateur 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 l'on revient avec des regles, l'art d'Albert Marquet donne une impression de peinture heureuse.

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 careful: one thing there is more ridiculous still, and that is counter-propaganda. Protestantism 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.



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. [Q] 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 discrimination. 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.

[Footnote Q: Written in March 1919.]

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, 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 proclaimed that any bugle-boy was a better musician 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 encouragement: 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 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 nothing: 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 [R] 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 performing dogs and distinctly less than the ventriloquist. The public accepted it because it accepts 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 relieve the merry misery of our revues and plays are now dispensed with as superfluous.

[Footnote R: The winter 1918-19.]

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 notoriously unfavourable to the critical spirit. The army canteen need not tempt its customers: neither need the ordinary shop under a rationing 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 expert 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 everything. There was a little man in a back street who imported just the coffee she wanted, another 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 desire to keep in with the majority; at last the 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 imposed 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, certainly, 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 civilization can exist; for want of it European civilization is seemingly about to perish.

Take the thing at its lowest. A rich, good-humoured fellow, replete with a fabulously expensive but distressingly ill-chosen dinner in a magnificently ill-furnished and over-lit restaurant, 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 sense of insolent luxury even: they bear witness 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 conventions. 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 technique and its spiritual restlessness. In the pre-historic age man's best energies were apparently 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 discoveries 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 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 ingenuity 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 ambitions 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 recognized 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, moribund 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 financial 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 maitre 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.



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 rancour! 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 concerned 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 improving 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 intensely 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 kissing. But, fortunately, it is possible for the 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 comprehension. 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! Look!" 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 convince, he has got to persuade the spectator that there is something before him that is really worth looking at. His own reaction, therefore, 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, 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 exposing 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 varied. 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 have artists been striving to convert the thrill of inspiration into significant form; never have they stuck long to any one converting-machine. Throughout the ages there has been a continual chopping and changing of "the artistic problem." Canons in criticism are as unessential as subjects 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 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 business.

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 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 excited 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 before 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 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 design 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 fidelite de l'histoire, parce qu'il a retranche la representation des chameaux, dont l'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 l'oeil du spectateur et l'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 enthusiast 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 etait doue d'une foi profonde: la piete 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 infecting 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 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 illustrate my theory?—when Delacroix passionately asserts that Poussin was an arch-revolutionary. [S]

[Footnote S: For this little history of Poussin criticism I am indebted to M. Paul Desjardins: Poussin (Paris, Librairie Renouard).]

The divergence between the pretexts alleged by our ancestors for their enthusiasm and the reasons given by us, moderns, is easily explained 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 extraordinary state of mind, and, unlike our forefathers, 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, or poetical, or beautiful even. We expect our critics to find some plausible cause for so considerable an effect. We ask too much. It is for the aesthetician 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 conviction 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 succeeded 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 irritating 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 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 proposition—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 reaction 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 sentimental. When we have picked ourselves up we begin to suppose that such a state of mind must have been caused by something of which the significance was inherent and the value 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 prepared. 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 thrilling enough, and exquisite may be; but it is self-conscious and reminiscent: it is conditioned. It is conditioned by our mood: what is more—critics please take note—this precedent mood not only colours and conditions our experience, but draws us inevitably towards those works of art in which it scents sympathy and approval. To a reflective moralist Wordsworth will always mean more than a yellow primrose meant to Peter Bell. In our moments of bitter disillusionment it is such a comfort to jest with Pope and His Lordship that we lose all patience with the advanced politician who prefers 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 sincerely 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 In Dr. Johnson's time "no composition in our language had been oftener perused than Pomfret'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 appeal 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 manifestations of beauty. History is adamant against any other conclusion. No one can quite escape his age, his civilization, and his peculiar disposition; from which it seems to follow that not even the unanimous censure of generations can utterly discredit anything. The admission 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 antipathies 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 disinterested 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 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 proved comfortable or exhilarating to a particular 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 demanding 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 man or woman of the nineties who was unmoved 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 reactions 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 [T] which, being written by critics, is sure to be read by them, I naturally take the opportunity of explaining that what I said, if rightly understood, was perfectly civil and obliging.

[Footnote T: Contributed to the Critical Supplement of The New Republic.]

Perhaps I shall stand a better chance of pardon when it is perceived that I, too, am 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 become 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 palaeontologist 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 discourse 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 provoking 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 presence of what he believes to be art, then to cajole or bully him into a receptive frame of mind. He must, therefore, besides conviction, possess a power of persuasion and stimulation; 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, and 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 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 infecting others with his own enthusiasm. Anyone 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 discriminating between artists, that of discriminating between the parts and qualities of a work of art, and the still different power of discriminating 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 enjoying, all means to that end must be good. The rest of this essay will be devoted to a consideration 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 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 dissection of what is not. I remember walking with an eminent contributor to The New Republic and a lady who admired so intemperately the writings of Rupert Brooke that our companion was at last provoked into analyzing them with magisterial 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 Marvell 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 discriminating 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 certain 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 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, commenting 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 Impressionism became self-conscious and pompous 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 work before him, and then confides them to the public. [U] 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 additions to our aesthetic experience. It is the instrument 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 disappointment and vexation, or else to common dishonesty, 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 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 admit 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.

[Footnote U: 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 mes 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 shown 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."]

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 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 vulgarity.

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 feelings. With the exception of Mr. Roger Fry there is not in England one critic capable of saying so much, to the purpose, about the intrinsic 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 qualities 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 objective 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 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 representative, 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 historical 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 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.



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 practised these artists are as unlike each other as are hounds to the eye of a huntsman. Certainly, 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 inhabits 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—



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 thoroughness, 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) [V] 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.

[Footnote V: At the Independent Gallery, 1921.]

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 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 picture to the brim; he has a technique adequate to his conception; but he has neither the practical readiness nor the intellectual robustness 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 conception 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 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 impersonal; 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, considered 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 continuity 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 something, 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 performing 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 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 impressions home and elaborates them; he brings his intellect to bear on them; and, as this exhibition 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 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 rightness.

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 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 remarkable 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.



WILCOXISM

To return from Paris, full of enthusiasm for contemporary art, and find oneself forced immediately into an attitude of querulous hostility 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, [W] a critic who hopes that his country is not once again going to make itself the laughing-stock of Europe is bound at all risks to say something disagreeable.

[Footnote W: February 1920.]

In that delightful book The Worlds and I, for bringing me acquainted with which I shall ever be grateful to The Athenaeum, 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 expectation 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 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 magazine-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, Tchekov, or Dostoevsky.

And, as Mrs. Wilcox had no reason for supposing 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 compared favourably with that of most poets. To be sure there was Shakespeare and the celebrated 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 appraising 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 symptoms of the disease—this distressing disease of Wilcoxism—in The Athenaeum 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 unnaturally 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 appetizing novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan are distinctly better than Hardy's Wessex tales, and 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 themselves 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 below 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 prepared to class him with Matisse, Picasso, Derain, and Bonnard.

Having bravely recognized this disagreeable truth, let us take as much interest in contemporary British painting as we can. I will try 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 picture 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 pictures. 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 sensation, but from a moral conviction. So, naturally enough, what they produce is mere "arty" anecdote. This, perhaps, is the secret of their success—their success, I mean, with the cultivated 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 parlous 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 insist 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.

Wilcoxism is a terrible disease because it slowly but surely eats away our sense of imperfection, our desire for improvement, and our power of self-criticism. Modesty and knowledge 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.



ART AND POLITICS

Mr. Roger Fry, by means of an instructive tale (Athenaeum, 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 admiration had anything to do with the artistic gifts of either of these painters, any more than that the respect with which the British Government treats the names of Raphael and Michel Angelo should be taken to imply that any single one of His Majesty's ministers has ever experienced an 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 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 of 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 beside the point. To say that a work is aristocratic 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. 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 historians. For instance, it is often remarked, and generally with surprise, that progressive politicians are commonly averse to new movements 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 tradition of Ingres. The example usually cited by exponents of this theory—that progressive politicians are reactionary in art—is the notorious hostility of Liberals to the romantic movement; but I believe that were they to study closely the histories of the Impressionist, the Pre-Raphaelite, and the Wagnerian movements they would find in them, too, evidence on the whole favourable to their case. Be that as it may, this theory, 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 whatever to do with such things there is no more reason why a Radical should like new forms of art than why he should like new brands of 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 incomprehensible. 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 disappoints 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 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 reaction 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 historians to make them accept without demur the doctrine that the age of Pericles was the great age of visual art, and repeat it without mentioning the fact that in that age an aristocracy of some twenty-five thousand citizens was supported by the compulsory labours of some four hundred thousand 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 bureaucracies of China, Persia, and Byzantium. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries it flourished under the feudal system, and in the fifteenth amongst the oligarchies and tyrannies of Italy. On the other hand, neither the Roman Republic nor the Roman Empire gave us anything 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 art should apparently be indifferent, not only to political systems, but to social conditions as well. Barbarism or Civilization: it is all one to 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 Empire, 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 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 connection 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 significance 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 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 ebullient personality?

It is possible to speak of civilized or uncivilized 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 passion; 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 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 constitutionalism 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 enthusiasm 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 importance. 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 frantically 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 movement is unlikely to live long on anything so relevant to art; for artists, it seems, must believe that they are concerned with something altogether different. Wherefore, I think it not improbable—indeed, there are indications already [X]—that, political progress having in the last few years somewhat outrun civilization, and the new democracy being apparently hostile to art and culture, artists will take to believing 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.

[Footnote X: September 1920.]



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 absurd, he may make a formidable and contemptuous 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 nevertheless 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-negre, 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, 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 fanaticism? 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 l'on soit sage avec sobriete.

Did ever Frenchmen sympathize absolutely with Don Quixote? At any rate, because at the very base of his civilization lies that marvellous sense of social relations and human solidarity, a French artist will never feel entirely satisfied unless he can believe that his art is somehow related to, and justified by, Life.