Chapter V: The Mansard Gallery20 (1)

[Sidenote: _Nov. 1917_]

The collection of modern pictures made by Mr. Fry, and shown, first in Birmingham and then at the Mansard Gallery, is the most important we have seen in London since the beginning of the war--since the Grosvenor House show in the summer of 1914, to be exact. That the best exhibition we have seen for so long should be held in the best gallery is a bit of good luck which, in these unlucky days, seems extraordinary; but what seems miraculous almost is that Messrs. Heal and Sons seem positively to prefer good pictures to bad. I would, therefore, advise any one who thinks my advice worth having to keep an eye on the Mansard Gallery.

In this exhibition the best of the younger English artists--I am sorry there is nothing by Stanley Spenser, Wyndham Lewis, Bomberg or Roberts--are confronted by a handful of their French contemporaries. They are not confronted by the best of them: Mr. Fry has hung nothing by Matisse, Bonnard or Picasso, for instance, though, had he pleased, he could have shown a couple of pictures by the last-named, at any rate. He chose well, I dare say; but it is mere justice to admit that the only two French artists fairly represented are Marchand and de Vlaminck. For the rest, the single picture by l'Hote is a characteristic work of that engaging but not very formidable painter; the two small pictures by Friesz, good as they are, hardly rank among his masterpieces; there is in London at least one other work by Gris, and that, to my thinking, a better; while the Derain is by no means worthy of that eminent artist.

I wish we could have been shown three or four capital works by Derain, because there is no man in the modern movement more readily appreciated by people who care for painting, but boggle at the unfamiliar. I remember finding myself once in Kahnweiler's shop on the Boulevards with an extremely intelligent official from South Kensington, and I remember his admitting with excellent candour that, though the Picassos still puzzled him, he was a thorough convert to Derain. Naturally: how should a man of taste and erudition not appreciate the exquisite scholarship of an artist who can use the masters of painting as a very fine man of letters--Charles Lamb, for instance--uses the masters of literature? For Derain is one who has gone to the root of the matter and can remind you of the Siennese school or have a joke with Pinturicchio by a subtler method than quotation. When such a one bases his art on Cezanne and the _douanier_ Rousseau, treating them quite simply as masters, an intelligent spectator is bound to unlock his most finished prejudices and take another look at them.

Marchand and de Vlaminck dominate one end of the gallery. There are three pictures by each, they are admirably hung, and the effect produced by this pool of distinguished and beautifully ordered colour is marvellous. One is brought to a stand by that indescribable sense that has come to most of us on entering for the first time some well-arranged room in an important continental gallery--a sense of being in the presence of great art. Closer examination, without destroying the unity of effect, proves these two men to be about as different as two very good artists of the same school and country can be. On Marchand I said my say two years ago when I wrote a preface for his show at Carfax: he is pre-eminently solid and architectural, and obviously he is highly sensitive--by which I mean that his reactions to what he sees are intense and peculiar. But these reactions, one fancies, he likes to take home, meditate, criticize, and reduce finally to a rigorously definite conception. And this conception he has the power to translate into a beautifully logical and harmonious form. Power he seems never to lack: it would be almost impossible to paint better. I do not know which of Marchand's three pictures is the best; but whichever it be, it is the best picture in the gallery.

With de Vlaminck it is from a word to a blow, from a thrilling emotion to a finished picture. If Marchand is like a minor Milton--the comparison is not one to be pressed--de Vlaminck is like Keats. He is the most lyrical of the younger Frenchmen; the flash and sparkle of his pictures is the wonderfully close expression of a tremblingly delighted sensibility. Yet there is nothing sketchy about them. Consider his landscape (No. 65), and you will be astonished to find what a solid, self-supporting design these delicately graded tones and lightly brushed forms compose.

Only one Englishman holds his own with the French painters, and he, of course, is Duncan Grant. The challenge to another very interesting young Englishman is, however, more marked since the de Vlaminck of which I have just spoken has as its rival on the wall, at right angles to it, _The Mill_ (No. 32), by Mark Gertler. The comparison made, what first strikes one is that the Gertler, for all its assertion of strength and its emphatic, heavy accents, looks flimsy beside its lightly brushed and airy neighbour. But _The Mill_ is not the piece by which Gertler should be judged; let us look rather at his large and elaborate _Swing Boats_. I have seen better Gertlers than this; the insistent repetition of not very interesting forms makes it come perilously near what Mr. Fry calls in his preface "merely ornamental pattern-making," but it is a picture that enables one to see pretty clearly the strength and weakness of this remarkable person.

With a greater artistic gift, Mark Gertler's conviction and conscience would suffice to make him a painter of the first magnitude. Unfortunately, his artistic gift, one inclines to suppose, is precisely that irreducible minimum without which an artist cannot exist. That is his weakness. His strength is that he exploits that minimum uncompromisingly to its utmost possibility. Gertler is one who will never say an idle word in paint, no matter how charming or interesting or amusing it might be. In his pictures you will look in vain for a single brush-stroke that does not serve his single purpose; he admits no adventitious dainties, there is nothing to quote. Happy touches are not in his way. Should he find some part of his picture empty he will not fill it with nicely balancing daisies, clouds, or bric-a-brac; he will begin it again. To him it will seem either that he has failed to conceive his work as a whole or that he has failed to realize his conception. Similarly, you will not easily discover a favourite passage; for if he felt that he had succeeded beyond expectation in one passage, that some note was sharper and truer than the rest, he would set himself to key the rest to that note. In art, such a process means incredible labour and agony; Gertler sweats blood and shows it. He labours terribly, and his pictures are terribly laboured. He is not artist enough to paint as a bird sings; he paints as a desperate soldier might dig himself in.

What he has to express is not, it must be confessed, of the highest quality, because his reactions are limited and rather undistinguished. He has only two or three notes, and they are neither rich nor rare. For an artist he is unimaginative, and often in their blank simplicity his conceptions are all but commonplace. In actual expression, too, though a first-rate craftsman who paints admirably, he lacks sensibility. In his handwriting--his lines and dashes, smudges and contours, that is to say--there is neither charm nor temperament. His colours do their work, saying what they have to say, but are without beauty in themselves or in their relations. There is something slightly depressing in the unlovely sincerity of his execution that reminds me rather of Fra Bartolomeo, and his imaginative limitations might be compared with those of Lesueur. I am taking a high standard, you perceive. And any one who cannot respond to the conviction and conscience with which he not only excludes whatever is irrelevant or fortuitous or false, but does positively realize his conceptions is, in my judgment, incapable of appreciating visual art.

No art could be more different from the art of Gertler than that of Duncan Grant. For him it seems impossible to scrabble a line or wipe his brush on a bit of paper without giving delight. As the saying goes, he is all over an artist. Men endowed with this prodigious sensibility, facility, and sense of beauty are not uncommon in England. In my time there have been four--Conder, Steer, John, and Duncan Grant. The danger is, of course, that they will fall into a trick of flicking off bits of empty prettiness to the huge contentment of a public that cannot bear artists to develop or be serious. But Duncan Grant shows no bad symptoms: from his early picture _Lemon Gatherers_ (No. 35) (justly and almost universally admired for its great beauty and delightful references to Piero della Francesca) to the little "still life" in the north corner of the room, there is a vast progression; and beneath these gay and delicious paintings--so delicious one could fancy them good to eat--is a struggle with the problems of design and space-composition as vital as anything here to be found, unless it be in the work of Marchand. I noticed, by the way, that in _Lemon Gatherers_, a picture on cardboard, something is going wrong with the colours, and of this I take rather a serious view as the picture belongs to me. Duncan Grant is the hope of patriotic amateurs: blessed with adorable gifts and a powerful intellect, he should, if he has the strength to realize his conceptions and the courage to disdain popularity, become what we have been awaiting so long, an English painter in the front rank of European art.

Of the remaining British artists, the most interesting, to my mind, is Vanessa Bell. The influence of Duncan Grant on her work is unmistakable, and I hope, unlike most artists, who seem to suppose that for them the laws of cause and effect and the influence of environment are inoperative, she will not mind my saying so. Why, in artists so original as Giotto, El Greco, and Cezanne, at least 50 per cent is derivative! Vanessa Bell, like all artists, and especially women artists, is impressionable, but as the effect on her work of familiarity with one or two English painters and the modern French masters is altogether for the good, I see no harm in that. At the same time, she has very personal gifts. Besides a large simplicity of style, there is about her drawing something oddly sympathetic, and what I should call, for want of a better word, amusing; while a sense of the peculiar significance to her of certain forms and relations of forms comes through and gives to her work an air of intimacy that you will get from nothing else in this exhibition. Any woman who can make her work count in the art of her age deserves to be criticized very seriously. In literature the authoress stands firm on her own feet; only quite uneducated people--subaltern-poets and young Latin philosophers--believe that women cannot write; but it is a mere truism to say that no woman-painter, _pace_ Madame Vigee-Lebrun, has yet held her own with contemporaries even. To-day there are at least three--Marie Laurencin, Goncharova, and Vanessa Bell--whose claim to take rank amongst the best of their generation will have to be answered very carefully by those who wish to disallow it. Behind them press half a dozen less formidable but still serious candidates, and I wish Mr. Fry would bring together a small collection of their works. It would be interesting to see how and how much they differ from the men; and, unless I mistake, it would effectively give the lie to those who fancifully conclude that because the Muses were women it is for women to inspire rather than create.

FOOTNOTE:

[20] This article was written for the _Nation_, but owing to a series of misfortunes could not be published until the exhibition was over. It then seemed best to reserve it for this collection.

CONTEMPORARY ART IN ENGLAND

[Sidenote: _Burlington Magazine July 1917_]

Only last summer, after going round the London galleries, a foreign writer on art whose name is as well known in America as on the Continent, remarked gloomily, and in private of course, that he quite understood why British art was almost unknown outside Great Britain. The early work of Englishmen, he admitted, showed talent and charming sensibility often, but, somehow or other, said he, their gifts fail to mature. They will not become artists, they prefer to remain British painters. They are hopelessly provincial, he said; and so they are.

Of our elder living artists--those, that is to say, who had found themselves and developed a style before the influence of Cezanne became paramount on the Continent--Mr. Sickert is probably the only one whom a continental amateur would dream of collecting; and he, be it noted, escaped early from British provincialism and plunged into the main stream of European art. On the other hand, the names of Mr. Steer, Mr. John, Mr. Orpen and Mr. McEvoy, here only less familiar than those of Cabinet Ministers or County Cricketers, abroad are as obscure. Mr. Steer, to be sure, has his portrait in the Uffizi, but then, as likely as not, the Poet Laureate has his birthday ode in the _Bibliotheque Nationale_. If Mr. Steer and Sir Edward Poynter are treated civilly abroad, that may be because England is an important country rather than because they are important artists.

No wonder patriots are vexed to find English art esteemed on the Continent and in America below the art of Germany or Scandinavia, seeing that English artists seem to possess more native sensibility than either Germans or Scandinavians and, perhaps, as much as Russians. Yet it is a fact that their work, by reason of its inveterate suburbanity, so wholly lacks significance and seriousness that an impartial historian, who could not neglect the mediocre products of North and East Europe, would probably dismiss English painting in a couple of paragraphs. For it is not only poor; it is provincial: and provincial art, as the historian well knows, never really counts.

It would be pleasant to fancy that England was working out, in isolation, an interesting and independent art; but clearly she is doing no such thing. There is no live tradition, nothing but fashions as stale as last week's newspaper. All that is alive is a private schoolboy rivalry, an ambition to be cock of the walk or to ape the cock, to be _primus inter pares_ or _amico di primus_. There is no live English tradition; and as English painters refuse obstinately to accept the European, and as artists do not spring up unaccountably as groundsel and dandelions appear to do, this is a rather serious misfortune. Art does not happen, it grows--not necessarily in the right direction. The fact that the development of art traced through schools and movements squares pretty well with historical fact proves conclusively the existence of "influences" in art. No one will deny that Botticelli was an original and extremely personal artist or that he is the obvious successor of Lippo Lippi. El Greco is called by some the most lonely figure in the history of art--yet it needs no wizard to divine that Titian was his master or that he was reared in the Byzantine tradition. Artists, though they hate being told so, are, in fact, like other things, subject to the law of cause and effect. Young artists, especially, are influenced by their surroundings and by the past, particularly the immediate past, by the men from five to thirty years older than themselves.

Art lives on tradition, of which contemporary culture is nothing but the last development. But English artists, for the most part, ignore the real tradition, and what passes for development here is no more, as a rule, than a belated change of fashion. All that is vital in modern art is being influenced by the French masters--Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, Bonnard, Maillol, who, in their turn, were influenced by the Impressionists, and who all have been nourished by that great French tradition which, of late, has been so surprisingly affected by the influx of Oriental art. English painting, however, has been left high and dry; and our younger men either imitate their teachers, too often second-rate drawing masters, enjoying at best a dull acquaintance with the Italian fifteenth and English eighteenth centuries, or, in revolt, set up for themselves as independent, hedgerow geniuses, ignorant, half-trained, and swollen by their prodigious conceit to such monsters as vastly astonish all those who can remember them as children.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that when men of talent make great men of themselves, wrapping up in the cloak of genius and fronting the world mysteriously, and when this attitude is tolerated by the public, there is reason to suspect that art fares ill. Since every extension lecturer knows that Raphael was part of a civilization greater than himself it seems unnecessary to treat a fashionable portrait-painter as though he were as inexplicable as an earthquake and as remote as the Matterhorn. One of the things to be desired in England is more respect for art and less reverence for artists.

English literature has a great tradition--the tradition of the greatest literature in the world. I say that in ignorance, to be sure, of Chinese, but not unmindful of Athenian. It would be inexact to describe that tradition as part of the main continental tradition which, since the middle of the seventeenth century, has been predominantly French, coloured in the eighteenth century by English, in the early nineteenth by German, and in the twentieth by Russian literature. Yet the English tradition, rich and splendid as it is, has never allowed itself for long to lose touch with the European current. The curious have only to turn from the works of our young writers to those of Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, Tchekov, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Claudel to appreciate the sensitiveness of English literature, which has never fallen into that insularity on which our lean visual art seems to pride itself. At moments--in mid-Victorian days, for instance--English literature may have appeared provincial; it was never suburban.

The tendency of British visual art to sink into a feeble barbarism seems to have existed always and to have asserted itself whenever we lost touch with the centre. The earliest English art, early Saxon sculpture, is good; it is a respectable part of that great Byzantine tradition which from the middle of the eighth to the middle of the ninth century appears to have been as vital in the north of England and in Ireland as in any part of Western Europe. The Normans kept England close to the centre and left us a little superb architecture; but from the beginning of the thirteenth century English visual art--architecture, painting, and sculpture--begins to take on that absurd air of being out of it which has since become the unfailing characteristic of an exhibition of home-made arts and crafts. In the seventeenth century we again got into touch with the movement and the genius of Inigo Jones and Wren gave us some admirable architecture. In the eighteenth we produced two painters of note, Blake and Crome, both of whom suffered desperately from their deplorable surroundings. What was interesting in Constable and Turner was seized and made use of more quickly and far more intelligently by French than by native artists. Here they were treated as isolated geniuses; there they were absorbed into the tradition of painting.

A student of contemporary art who found himself in the company of painters and amateurs in any great central city abroad--Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Moscow, Munich, Vienna, Geneva, Milan, or Barcelona--would be able to discuss, and doubtless would discuss, the contemporary movement. That movement, as every one outside England seems to know, radiates from France. He would discuss, therefore, the respective merits of Matisse, Picasso, Marquet, Marchand, Friesz, Derain, Bonnard, de Vlaminck, Maillol, Laprade, Segonzac, Delaunay, etc. etc.; and not only discuss and criticize their works, but the direction in which each was moving, the influence of one on another, and the influence of Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, or the _douanier_ Rousseau on all. Such a company would know something about the development of the movement in other countries; it would have something to say about Kandinsky and the Munich painters, about Goncharova and Larionoff, about the Barcelona school, and even about the Italian futurists. In a word, it would be able to talk about contemporary European painting. Only in an English studio would such conversation be hard to come by: there one might learn that Mr. Smith was a greater genius than Miss Jones, that Mrs. Robinson would never finish her picture in time for the New English Exhibition, that Mr. John was the greatest painter in the world--though Mr. Innes had once run him hard--and that the greatest sculptor was some one whose name I cannot recall. Of contemporary French painting at most a perfunctory word; yet to ignore it is to put oneself beyond the pale of contemporary culture. And there, it seems, is just where we must look for English art; in European civilization it has no place. It is out of it; it is suburban.

Educated people, enjoying some knowledge of what has been happening abroad during the last fifty years, can scarcely conceive the ignorance and insularity of contemporary British painters. It was only the other day that one of the best of them, fired by Mr. Roger Fry's article in the _Burlington Magazine_, walked into the National Gallery and saw for the first time a Renoir. He was duly impressed; and hurried off, I am glad to say, to buy a book of reproductions. Another promising painter, who was in Paris just before the war, not only never saw a Cezanne, a Gauguin, a Matisse or a Picasso, but was equally neglectful of the Impressionist masters, never taking the trouble to visit the Luxembourg and inspect the Caillebotte bequest. Imagine a continental man of science who in 1880 had never taken the trouble to read "The Origin of Species" or investigate the theory of evolution!

The state of mind produced in most English painters by this outlandish ignorance is calamitous. Unconscious of what is going on abroad, dimly, at best, aware of what has been done in the past, and lacking effective, well-informed criticism from writers in the newspapers and from their fellow-artists, they work without standards, ideals or artistic seriousness, and soon fall into that ghastly complacency in which a man is content to satisfy the market with endless repetition of some popular success. Modesty is a virtue hardly attainable by the prize student from the Slade or the Academy who is persuaded that in a few years he will be the prize painter of the world, and is, in a few years, by press and public duly confirmed in his delusion. His first ambition will be to get a picture accepted by the Royal Academy or the New English Art Club, his next to wheedle the quidnuncs--i.e. the newspaper men--into giving him a place amongst the local worthies, his last to discover a formula that shall be the strong-box of his lucky hit. This accomplished, commissions and paragraphs begin to roll in with comfortable regularity, and he rests replete--a leading British artist. Is he ever plagued with nightmares, I wonder, in which he dreams that outside England no competent amateur could possibly take him seriously?

Some British artists, when they were young--and some of them must once have been so--are said to have studied in Paris. Does it ever occur to them that their proper rivals, the men whose rivalry is stimulating and not merely disquieting, are not to be found in London? And does it occur to them that, instead of hunting for tips in Bond Street and Burlington House they might go for lessons to the National Gallery and South Kensington? Whatever people may think of the art of Henri Matisse, his fame is beyond cavil. Just before the war commissions and entreaties were pouring in on him, not from France only, but from Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, and America. He had--he has, for that matter--what no English painter, with the possible exception of Constable, ever had--a European reputation. Yet in the spring of 1914, looking with a friend at a picture by Chardin, he is said to have remarked that if he could believe that one day he would paint as good a thing as that he would be extremely happy. If one of our famous portrait-painters would go for once to the National Gallery and stand, not before a great master, but before a Philippe de Champaigne or a Vivarini, I wonder what he would say.

It is hard to conjecture; for our portrait-painters live in a world which, though not insensitive to prettiness, and impressed by obvious manifestations of ability, cares nothing for art or good painting. In such a world an artist--who is, after all, little better than a human being--can hardly be expected to develop his critical faculty. If some of our gifted men were to take their talents to Paris, where is a press and public that knows how to be serious about art, they would, one fancies, begin to feel dissatisfied with their facile triumphs and appetizing confections. They would feel, too, that they were surrounded by people who could recognize and appreciate conviction and science even though these were presented in forms too recondite for the mob. They would find that in Paris a painter can have praise enough without stooping for the applause of Mayfair. It is significant that, whereas English painters once they have found a style that hits the public taste, are not much inclined to change it, in Paris such an artist as Picasso, who has taken the fancy of amateurs and dealers in at least three different manners, goes on from experiment to experiment, leaving the public to follow as best it can.

But this difference between the atmosphere of London and of Paris brings up a question that had best be stated at once. What are the causes of British provincialism? Though its existence is a fact that runs right through the history of British art, it would be rash to assume that the causes have always been the same. For instance, the geographical isolation of England may at one time have been a cause; that has been removed by railways and steamboats. It will be sensible to speak in this article only of present causes of present ills.

Some people will have it that the insignificance of English art is very simply to be explained by a complete absence of native talent; but the mere inspection of English children's and students' work suffices to dispose of this too convenient hypothesis. In no country, perhaps, except France, is there more of that raw material from which good art is made. More plausible is the theory that the vast and towering greatness of English literature overhangs and starves all other forms of expression. In such a land as this it seems natural that any sense of art or power of creation should drift towards literature, and almost inevitable that the painters themselves should be half poets at heart, hardly convinced of the intrinsic value of their own medium, tending ever to substitute literary for plastic significance. Every critic is on the watch for a literary symbol and the chance of an allegorical interpretation, every cultivated amateur is eager to spy out an adroitly placed anecdote or shaft of pictorial satire; only with great pains is any one induced to regard a picture as an independent creation of form. In so literary a society it seems paradoxical almost to believe in pure painting; and, in despair, we cry out that no country can be expected to excel, at one time, in two arts. We forget Athens and Tuscany; we also forget France. For more than two hundred years France has led the visual art of Europe; and if English painting were ever to become one-tenth part as good as French literature I, for my part, should be as pleased as surprised. Of music I say nothing; yet in that art too France was beginning, just before the war, to challenge, not very formidably perhaps, the pre-eminence of Germany and to stand as the fair rival of Russia.

What hampers English artists most is, unless I mistake, the atmosphere in which they work. In France--in Germany too, they say--there is a fairly large, authoritative, and intensely serious public composed of artists, critics, and competent amateurs. This public knows so well what it is about that no painter, be he never so grandly independent, can make himself impervious to its judgments. It is an unofficial areopagus which imposes its decisions, unintentionally but none the less effectively, on the rich floating _snobisme_ of Paris and of continental Europe. Those who go to the _Salon_ for their art or invest in Henners and Bougereaus are reckoned hopelessly bourgeois even by the cultivated pressmen. It is a fastidious public, intelligent, learned, and extremely severe: painting it regards as an end in itself, not as a branch of journalism or a superior amenity; and no artist can begin to abuse his talent or play tricks with the currency without getting from this formidable body the sort of frown that makes even a successful portrait-painter wince. Indeed, many popular continental likeness-catchers, some of whom enjoy the highest honours in this country, having come under its ban, are now ruled out of contemporary civilization.[21] In England, on the other hand, the artist's public consists of that fringe of the fashionable world which dabbles in culture and can afford to pay long prices; from it the press obsequiously takes the cue; and any honest burgher who may wish to interest himself in the fine arts goes, I presume, for instruction to the place from which instruction comes--I mean the ha'penny papers.

Patronage of the arts in England is an expensive pleasure. In France the prices of the most promising young men range from one hundred to one thousand francs, and many an amateur with a first-rate collection of modern work has never paid more than five hundred francs for a picture. The Englishman who would possess the works of native geniuses must be able to put down from L50 to L2000. Thus it comes about that a few of the richer people in the more or less cultivated class form in England the artist's public. To them he must look for criticism, sympathy, understanding, and orders; and most of them, unluckily, have no use either for art or for good painting. What they want is furniture and a background--pretty things for the boudoir, handsome ones for the hall, and something jolly for the smoking-room. They want, not art, but amenity; whether they get it is another matter. What is certain is that their enthusiasms and disappointments, likes and dislikes, fancies and prejudices, have nothing whatever to do with art.

Behind the patrons and their decorators there is, of course, that odd little world sometimes called Bohemia, about which very little need be said. Every master, be he academician, New Englisher, or comic illustrator, is followed by a tail of lads and lasses whose business it is to sing the great man's praises and keep up, in the face of disheartening indifference, the pathetic tradition of British immorality. They give tips to the critics sometimes, but no one else marks them.

Such being the public, not unnaturally the more serious and independent painters endeavour to set up small coteries of their own as far from Mayfair and the Chelsea embankment as possible. Thus arose the Camden Town group under Mr. Sickert, thus arose the Friday Club and the London group. And here we may pause in our miserable and comminatory progress to admit gladly that in such societies are to be found plenty of talent and of what is much rarer, sincerity. Here are men who take art seriously; here are men who have no prospective sitter, no rich patron, no terrible drawing-master in mind; here are men to whom painting is the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar provincialism; but in its lack of receptivity, its too willing aloofness from foreign influences, its tendency to concentrate on a mediocre and rather middle-class ideal of honesty, it is, I suspect, typically British. There is nothing Tennysonian about these men, nothing Kiplingesque; their art is neither meretricious nor conceited; but it reminds one oddly of perpendicular architecture.

These are the men that might profit by good criticism, for they are intelligent and fair-minded. Alas! English criticism is more woefully out of it than painting even. The ignorance of our critics is appalling.[22] Seven years ago there was brought over to London a collection of pictures by Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Every man and woman on the Continent who claimed acquaintance with modern art had already come to some conclusion about these painters whose works were in the public collections of Germany and the North and in the private collections of directors of French galleries. Some thought that they took rank amongst the very great painters of the world; others that there was a general disposition to overrate them; no one denied that they were considerable men or that Cezanne was a master. In London no one had heard of them, so it was decided out of hand that they were immoral aliens fit only to be thrown on the nearest bonfire. Cezanne was a butcher, Gauguin a _farceur_, Van Gogh a particularly disagreeable lunatic: that is what the critics said, and the public said "Hee-haw." They reminded one of a pack of Victorian curates to whom the theory of natural selection had been too suddenly broken. Two years later Roger Fry and I collected and arranged at the Grafton Galleries an exhibition of contemporary French art--Matisse, Picasso, Maillol, etc. Every one abroad had recognized these men as interesting artists of varying merit; no one doubted that the movement they represented was significant and of promise. Only the English critics had learnt nothing. They never do; they only teach. Here was something going on under their noses that might well turn out to be as important as the early fifteenth-century movement in Tuscany, and they went on directing the attention of their pupils to the work of Alfred Stevens. Here was the art of the East--of China, Persia, and Turkestan--being revealed to us by European scholars, and they went on messing about with English choir-stalls and sanctuary-rings.

Our critics and teachers provided, and continue to provide, an artistic education comparable with the historical education provided by our board-schools. People who have been brought up to believe that the history of England is the history of Europe--that it is a tale of unbroken victory, leadership, and power--feel, when they hear of the ascendancy of France or of the House of Austria or of the comparative insignificance of England till the dawn of the eighteenth century, angry first and then incredulous. So they give themselves the least possible chance of hearing such unpalatable nonsense by living snugly in the slums and suburbs, where, persuaded that they have nothing to learn from damned foreigners, they continue to entertain each other with scraps of local and personal gossip. That is what our art criticism sounds like to cultivated people from abroad.

A few months ago an extraordinarily fine Renoir, a recognized masterpiece of modern art, was hung in the National Gallery. Any young painter who may have seen and profited by it need not thank those directors of public taste, the critics. It was passed by in silence or with a nod by the bulk of our paid experts, who were much more pleased by a particularly poor but very large Puvis, which possibly reminded them in some obscure way of a pre-Raphaelite picture.[23] But when there was question of selling a block of unimportant water-colours by our national Turner and buying with the proceeds two or three great masterpieces of Italian art the hubbub of these patriot-geese rose for a moment above the noise of battle. Such is the atmosphere in which young British artists are expected to mature.

One wonders what is going to happen to them--these young or youngish Englishmen of talent. There are at least half a dozen on whom a discerning critic would keep a hopeful eye--Mr. Duncan Grant, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Stanley Spenser, Mr. Gertler, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Bomberg, Mrs. Bell, and Mr. Epstein--for it would be absurd to omit from this list an artist possessed of such skill, scholarship, and surprising powers of improvisation and development as the last-named. Of these some already have been touched by that breath of life which, blowing from Paris, has revolutionized painting without much discomposing the placid shallows of British culture. Standing in the broad light of European art, these can hardly detect that sacred taper which the New English Art Club is said to shield from the reactionary puffings of the Royal Academy. And, although it is a dangerous thing in the suburbs to ignore nice points of precedence and venerable feuds, such magnanimity makes for progress. Mr. Grant, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Epstein, and Mrs. Bell, at any rate, are all cut by Tooting, for they have seen the sun rise and warmed themselves in its rays; it is particularly to be regretted, therefore, that Mr. Lewis should have lent his great powers to the canalizing (for the old metaphor was the better) of the new spirit in a little backwater called English vorticism, which already gives signs of becoming as insipid as any other puddle of provincialism. Can no one persuade him to be warned by the fate of Mr. Eric Gill, who, some ten years ago, under the influence presumably of Malliol, gave arresting expression to his very genuine feelings, until, ridden by those twin hags insularity and wilful ignorance, he drifted along the line of least resistance and, by an earnest study of English ecclesiastical ornament, reduced his art to something a little lower than English alabasters? The danger is there always; and unless our able young men make a grand struggle, they too will find themselves sucked into the backwater, impotent, insignificant, and prosperous.

It is not treasonable, I think, to hope that the war will some day be over. And let no one imagine that when the war is over it will be found that the new movement in France is dead or dying. In little periodicals, photographs, brochures, letters, and stray works that from time to time cross the Channel there is plenty of evidence that it is as vital as ever. Even a European war cannot kill a thing of that sort. The question is whether, after the war, young English artists will realize that they too, by reason of their vocation, of the truth that is in them, belong to a communion wider and far more significant than the conventicle to which they were bred. England, we hear, is to wake up after the war and take her place in a league of nations. May we hope that young English artists will venture to take theirs in an international league of youth? That league existed before the war; but English painters appear to have preferred being pigmies amongst cranes to being artists amongst artists. _Aurons-nous change tout ca? Qui vivra verra._ The league exists; its permanent headquarters are in Paris; and from London to Paris is two hundred and fifty miles--a journey of seven and a half hours in times of peace.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] Since these words were written the British Press, or the Government maybe, has had the bright idea of interning one of them. To be sure he was a very bad painter; but the punishment seems rather severe for an offence which usually incurs nothing worse than a knighthood.

[22] There are, of course, exceptions. The critics of the _Times_, the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Evening Standard_, for instance, are neither ignorant nor stupid; but they are all, one fancies, hampered by nervous and ill-educated editors.

[23] I have referred already to Mr. Roger Fry's article in the _Burlington Magazine_, and would draw attention also to his article in the _Nation_.

ART AND WAR[24]

An acquaintance of mine, a French artist, who used to live in England and paint pictures for which I care nothing but on which the cultured dote, started early in August to join his regiment, leaving behind him his wife and five children. So miserable was the prospect before these that a benevolent lady wrote to such of her rich friends as happened to be amateurs of painting praying them to buy a picture or two and so help the family of their unfortunate favourite. One and all refused, severely giving the lady to understand that this was no time to think about art. Of charity they said nothing; but they were generous, I dare say, in some more patriotic and conspicuous fashion.

Charity, however, is beside my point. What interests me in this little story is the unanimity with which the cultivated people agree that this is no time for art. It interests me because I have lately been taken to task for saying that the cultured regard art as no more than an elegant amenity. The war has put my opinion to the proof and I am shocked to discover how much I was in the right. From every quarter comes the same cry--"This is no time for art!" Those galleries and exhibitions which are not closed are visited chiefly by homeless refugees; if literary taste goes beyond the newspapers it is only to salute the verse of Mr. Begbie and the prose of Mr. H. G. Wells; even at concerts our ears are exasperated by national platitudes and the banalities of our Allies. This is no time for art. Good taste is unpatriotic; the man who continues to care for painting, poetry, or music is little better than a Hun.

That people who in times of peace treat art as an amenity should feel that this is no time for art is, I suppose, natural. That they should expect those who feel that art is the most important thing in the world to do the same seems to me unreasonable. To those who care seriously for art, to those for whom it is a constant source of passionate emotion, the notion that this is no time for art seems as ludicrous as to a Christian mystic of the ninth century would have seemed the notion that that tortured age was no time for religious ecstasy. People who are capable of ecstasy, be it religious or aesthetic, are apt to distinguish between ends and means. They know that empires and dominations, political systems and material prosperity and life itself are valuable only as means to those states of mind which alone are good as ends. Thus it comes about that the things which to the majority are of primary importance, because to the majority they seem to be ends, are to a handful of mystics and artists of secondary importance because to them they are no more than means. They cannot forget about art and think exclusively about war, because if they forgot about art the world and its ways would seem unworthy of thought. Public activities and operations they feel are of consequence only in so far as they affect the things that matter--the raptures of art and religion, that is to say, and abstract thought and personal relations.

It is not reasonable to expect us to turn our backs on absolute good and consider exclusively what may be a means to good. Besides, we could not do so if we would. The artist must think more about art, the philosopher more about truth, the mystic more about God, the aesthete more about beauty, and the lover, they tell me, more about the beloved, than about anything else. The fact is, we are not practical people; we cannot adjust ourselves to circumstances, so we must be content to appear imprudent and unpatriotic. We are not masters of our fate; not only have we got hold of what we believe to be the greatest thing in the world, the greatest thing in the world has got hold of us.

A crisis has divided the sheep from the goats--I care not on which hand I am marshalled--and now we know who are the people that love art because they must and who love it because they think they ought to. I am making no moral judgment; I am pointing out merely that those who say "This is no time to think about art" admit that for them thinking or not thinking about art is a matter of choice. I have always supposed that it was perfectly well with one who had lost himself in an ecstasy of creation or contemplation. How can he be better off who has already attained beatitude? To invite such a one to relinquish the best and bestir himself about what may be a means to good seems to me absurd. That has always been my opinion and I cannot conceive the circumstances that would compel me to change it. Those who reject it, those who deny that certain states of mind, amongst which is the state of aesthetic contemplation, are alone good as ends, will find themselves in an intellectual position which appears to me untenable: I shall not quarrel with them, however, so long as they leave us alone and refrain from cant. According to them there are better things than Beauty or Truth or the contemplation of either. I simply disagree: it is only when I catch them wringing their hands over the ruins of Reims that I protest.

Take not the name of art in vain: at least be ashamed to use it for political purposes. Any stick may be good enough to beat Germans with. Beat them if you can: I shall have no tears for them and their strong military government. It is not people like me who will weep for Prussia. But, though any stick may be good enough, some are too good. Besides, however much we love France and the French, let us have the justice to remember that if, as seems possible, French soldiers were using the cathedral as a post of observation, the Germans, according to what are called the rules of war, were in the right. In that case it was the French themselves who first transgressed that law which, they now tell us, makes neutral and inviolate works of art. For my own part, I utterly deny that it can ever, in any circumstances, be right to destroy or put in jeopardy beautiful things. But for any of those governments which took a hand in the deliberate ruin of the summer palace at Pekin to prate of vandalism and pose as defenders of art is not only disingenuous but silly. The spectacle of European soldiers and statesmen who, to admonish such evil Chinamen as might persist in defending their liberty and their religion, destroyed without demur the masterpieces of Oriental art, the spectacle, I say, of these people whimpering over the late Gothic of Louvain or the early Gothic of Reims, strikes me as being what the French, if their sense of humour had not suffered more than their monuments, would call _un peu trop fort_.

Reims is, or was--I am not sure whether we are more conscious of what existed before the bombardment or of what we imagine remains--Reims is or was a typical thirteenth-century building; and, like most thirteenth-century buildings, is or was, to my feeling, of no great artistic significance. That it is a venerable focus of sentiment no one denies; so, I suppose, is the monstrosity of Cologne and the Albert Memorial. I am not concerned with sentiment, but with art. Therefore, I must note that of such artistic value as the cathedral ever possessed the greater part was not destroyed by the German bombardment: it was destroyed when, some years ago, the upper part of the church was made as good as new by the Ministry of Fine Arts. Only the glass, and the sculpture over the little door in the north transept, and a few twelfth-or very early thirteenth-century figures which had escaped restoration will be a great loss to the world; and, for our comfort, we may remember that the glass was not comparable with the glass at Chartres or Bourges, while finer sculpture is to be seen in scores of Romanesque churches. I can listen with admirable patience to tales of damage done to Reims cathedral; but should the abbey church of St. Remi have been injured it would be less easy to pardon the responsible party. St. Remi is a masterpiece of the eleventh century, and was still, when last I saw it, a work of splendour and significance in spite of having suffered at the hands of French architects worse things than it is likely to have suffered from German gunners.

It is a mistake for the English upper classes to assure the world that they prize a work of art above a victory; the world knows better. Are not these the people who were telling us just now that this was no time for art? Is it seemly in them, is it prudent even, to revile their own class in Germany for caring as little about art as themselves? When the Germans sacked Louvain and shelled Reims our politicians and press discovered suddenly that art is a sacred thing and that people who disrespect it are brutes. Agreed: and how have the moneyed classes in England respected art? What sacrifices, material, moral or military, have they made? Here, in the richest country in the world, with what difficulty do we raise a few thousand pounds to buy a masterpiece. What institution do we starve so abjectly as we starve the National Gallery? Has any one met a rich man who denied himself a motorcar to keep a genius? How dare the people who fill our streets and public places with monuments that make us the laughing-stock of Europe, the people who cannot spare a few guineas to save a picture, who cheerfully improve away respectable architecture, who allow artists to perish and put up the Admiralty Arch--how dare such people pose as the champions of culture and expose their wounded feelings in the penny and halfpenny papers. In times of peace they used art as a hobby and a means of self-advertisement, in wartime they would brandish it as a stick against their foes. The old abuse was vulgar, the new one is worse.

We can measure the sensibility of these politic amateurs when we overhear their chatter about patriotic art and catch them, as we caught them lately, attempting to ban German music. "Give us patriotic art," they cry. As if art could be patriotic or unpatriotic! One might as well cry for patriotic mathematics. The essence of art is that it provokes a peculiar emotion, called aesthetic, which, like religious emotion or the passion for truth, transcends nationality. Art's supreme importance lies precisely in this: its glory is to share with truth and religion the power of appealing to that part of us which is unconditioned by time or place or public or personal interests. A work of art satisfies us aesthetically, just as a true proposition satisfies us intellectually, whether it was made in Germany or elsewhere: by whom it was created, when it was created, and where it was created are matters of no consequence to any one but an archaeologist.