nation
to leave out what Tchehov leaves out of his short stories than to say
what Meredith put into his long ones.

In the Plutarchian method there was ever a snare, and I have come near
treading in it. The difference between Matisse and Picasso is not to be
stated in those sharp antitheses that every journalist loves. Nothing
could be more obtuse than to represent one as all feeling and the other
all thought. The art of Picasso, as a matter of fact, is perhaps more
personal even than that of Matisse, just because his sensibility is
perhaps even more curious. Look at a Cubist picture by him amongst other
Cubists. Here, if anywhere, amongst these abstractions you would have
supposed that there was small room for idiosyncrasy. Yet at M. Leonce
Rosenberg's gallery no amateur fails to spot the Picassos. His choice
of colours, the appropriateness of his most astonishing audacities, the
disconcerting yet delightful perfection of his taste, the unlooked-for
yet positive beauty of his harmonies make Picasso one of the most
personal artists alive.

And if Picasso is anything but a dry doctrinaire, Matisse is no singing
bird with one little jet of spontaneous melody. I wish his sculpture
were better known in England, for it disposes finely of the ridiculous
notion that Matisse is a temperament without a head. Amongst his bronze
and plaster figures you will find sometimes a series consisting
of several versions of the same subject, in which the original
superabundant conception has been reduced to bare essentials by a
process which implies the severest intellectual effort. Nothing that
Matisse has done gives a stronger sense of his genius, and, at the same
time, makes one so sharply aware of a brilliant intelligence and of
erudition even.

Amongst the hundred differences between Matisse and Picasso perhaps,
after all, there is but one on which a critic can usefully insist. Even
about that he can say little that is definite. Only, it does appear to
be true that whereas Matisse is a pure artist, Picasso is an artist and
something more--an involuntary preacher if you like. Neither, of course,
falls into the habit of puffing out his pictures with literary stuff,
though Picasso has, on occasions, allowed to filter into his art a, to
me, most distasteful dash of sentimentality. That is not the point,
however. The point is that whereas both create without commenting on
life, Picasso, by some inexplicable quality in his statement, does