far above
the average, while in America there was Whistler. No one, I suppose,
would claim for any of these, save, perhaps, Whistler, a place even in
the second rank of artists. From which it follows clearly that something
more than delicacy of reaction and touch is needed to make a man
first-rate. What is needed is, of course, constructive power. An artist
must be able to convert his inspiration into significant form; for in
art it is not from a word to a blow, but from a tremulous, excited
vision to an orderly mental conception, and from that conception, by
means of the problem and with the help of technique, to externalization
in form. That is where intelligence and creative power come in. And no
British painter has, as yet, combined with sure and abundant sensibility
power and intelligence of a sort to do perfectly, and without fail, this
desperate and exacting work. In other words, there has been no British
painter of the first magnitude. But I mistake, or Gainsborough, Crome,
Constable, and Duncan Grant were all born with the possibility of
greatness in them.

Many British (or, to make myself safe, I will say English-speaking)
painters have had enough sensibility of inspiration to make them
distinguished and romantic figures. Who but feels that Wilson, Blake,
Reynolds, Turner, and Rossetti were remarkable men? Others have had that
facility and exquisiteness of handling which gives us the enviable and
almost inexhaustible producer of charming objects--Hogarth, Cotman,
Keene, Whistler, Conder, Steer, Davies. Indeed, with the exceptions of
Blake and Rossetti--two heavy-handed men of genius--and Reynolds, whose
reactions were something too perfunctory, I question whether there be a
man in either list who wanted much for sensibility of either sort. But
what English painter could conceive and effectively carry out a work of
art? Crome, I think, has done it; Gainsborough and Constable at any rate
came near; and it is because Duncan Grant may be the fourth name in
our list that some of us are now looking forward with considerable
excitement to his exhibition.

An Englishman who is an artist can hardly help being a poet; I neither
applaud nor altogether deplore the fact, though certainly it has been
the ruin of many promising painters. The doom of Englishmen is not
reversed for Duncan Grant: he is a poet; but he is a poet in the right
way--in the right way, I mean, for a painter to be a poet. Certainly
his vision is not