en is to a considerable extent the master of
Tchekov; but, as art is the last thing to which an English Intellectual
pays attention, this fact has been overlooked. What our latter-day
intellectuals take an interest in is what interested their
grandmothers--morals. They prefer Tchekov's point of view to that of
Ibsen, and so do I. They are vexed by the teaching implicit in Ibsen's
tendencious plays; so am I. Yet when I ask myself: "Is Ibsen's
moralizing worse than anyone else's?" I am forced to admit that it is
not. The fact is all moralizing is tedious, and is recognized as such by
everyone the moment it becomes a little stale. Another generation, with
other ideals, will be as much irritated by Tchekov's ill-concealed
propaganda as our generation is by Ibsen's, and as Ibsen's was by
Tennyson's. Depend upon it: by those young people in the next generation
but one who talk loudest, wear the worst clothes, and are most earnest
about life and least sensitive to art, Tchekov will be voted a bore.
What is more, it will be in the name of art that they will cry him down.

Every now and then we hear eloquent appeals to the appropriate
authorities, praying them to add to their school of journalism a
department of art criticism. I hope and believe the appropriate
authorities will do no such thing. Should, however, their sense of
economy be insufficient to restrain them from paying this last insult
to art, they will still find me waiting for them with a practical
suggestion. Any student proposing to educate himself as a critic should
be compelled to devote the first years of his course to the criticism
of non-representative art. Set down to criticize buildings, furniture,
textiles, and ceramics, he will find himself obliged to explore the
depths of his own aesthetic experience. To explain honestly and precisely
why he prefers this chair to that requires, he will find, a far more
intense effort of the intellect and imagination than any amount of fine
writing about portraits and landscape. It will force him to take account
of his purely aesthetic emotions and to discover what exactly provokes
them. He will be driven into that world of minute differences and subtle
reactions which is the world of art. And until he knows his way about
that world he would do well to express no opinion on the merits of
pictures and statues.

BONNARD [M]

[Footnote M: _Bonnard_. Par Leon Werth. Paris: Cres. 40 fr.]

In France, where even amateurs