eason. Matisse and Picasso are the
two immediate heirs to Cezanne. They are in the direct line; and through
one of them a great part of the younger generation comes at its share of
the patrimony. To their contemporaries they owe nothing: they came into
the legacy and had to make what they could of it. They are the elder
brothers of the movement, a fact which the movement occasionally resents
by treating them as though they were its elder sisters.

Even to each other they owe nothing. Matisse, to be sure, swept for one
moment out of his course by the overwhelming significance of Picasso's
early abstract work, himself made a move in that direction. But this
adventure he quickly, and wisely, abandoned; the problems of Cubism
could have helped him nothing to materialize his peculiar sensibility.
And this sensibility--this peculiar emotional reaction to what he
sees--is his great gift. No one ever felt for the visible universe just
what Matisse feels; or, if one did, he could not create an equivalent.
Because, in addition to this magic power of creation, Matisse has been
blest with extraordinary sensibility both of reaction and touch, he is
a great artist; because he trusts to it entirely he is not what for a
moment apparently he wished to be--a _chef d'ecole_.

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

Picasso is a born _chef d'ecole_. His is one of the most inventive minds
in Europe. Invention is as clearly his supreme gift as sensibility is
that of Matisse. His career has been a series of discoveries, each of
which he has rapidly developed. A highly original and extremely happy
conception enters his head, suggested, probably, by some odd thing he
has seen. Forthwith he sets himself to analyze it and disentangle those
principles that account for its peculiar happiness. He proceeds by
experiment,