g that changes, grows, and persists. The
artist with a new vision comes on the tradition at its near end, and
finds its implements lying in a heap mixed with the fashions of the
moribund movement. He chooses; he changes; what happens next will depend
a good deal on the state of public opinion. Should the artist have
the luck to be born in a sensitive age and an intelligent country his
innovations may be accepted without undue hubbub. In that case he will
realize that artists can no more dispense with the tradition than
tradition can exist without artists, and will probably come to feel an
almost exaggerated reverence for the monuments of the past. But should
the public be dull and brutish, and hardening the dust of dead movements
into what it is pleased to call "tradition," pelt with that word the
thing which above all others is to dull brutes disquieting--I mean
passionate conviction--the artist, finding himself assailed in the
name of tradition, will probably reply, "Damn the tradition." He will
protest. And, for an artist, to become a protestant is even worse than
using bad language.

Only in France, so far as I know, are the men who are working out the
heritage of Cezanne allowed to be artists and expected to be nothing
more. Elsewhere, the public by its uncritical attitude seems to
encourage them to pose as supermen or to become rebels. Assuredly I am
not advocating that slightly fatuous open-mindedness which led some
Germans to seize on the movement before it was well grown and deal with
it as they have dealt with so many others, collecting its artists as
though they were beetles, bottling them, setting them, cataloguing them,
making no mistake about them, and arranging them neatly in museums for
the dust to settle on. Organized alertness of that sort is only less
depressing than the smartness of those Italians who pounced so promptly
on the journalistic possibilities of the movement as a means of
self-advertisement. All I ask for in the public is a little more
intelligence and sensibility, and a more critical attitude. Surely,
by now, it should be impossible to hear what I heard only the other
day--Mr. Charles Shannon being extolled, to humiliate some enterprising
student, as a "traditional artist." Why, it would be as sensible to call
the man who makes nest-eggs a traditional Buff Orpington! And ought it
still to be possible for a cultivated dealer, because I had refused to
admire a stale old crust by some young