lls _l'epoque heroique_,
possessed most of the virtues and vices that such an epoch should
possess. It was rich in fine artists; and these artists were finely
prolific. It was experimental, and passionate in its experiments. It was
admirably disinterested. Partly from the pressure of opposition, partly
because the family characteristics of the Cezannides are conspicuous,
it acquired a rather deceptive air of homogeneity. It was inclined to
accept recruits without scrutinizing over closely their credentials,
though it is to be remembered that it kept its critical faculty
sufficiently sharp to reject the Futurists while welcoming the Cubists.
I cannot deny, however, that in that moment of enthusiasm and loyalty
we were rather disposed to find extraordinary merits in commonplace
painters. We knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of
Cezanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of
anyone else--but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after
all? Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of
Cezanne had made it possible for a mediocre artist to express a little
store of recondite virtue which under another dispensation must have
lain hid for ever. I doubt we exaggerated. We were much too kind, I
fancy, to a number of perfectly commonplace young people, and said a
number of foolish things about them. What was worse, we were unjust
to the past. That was inevitable. The intemperate ferocity of the
opposition drove us into Protestantism, and Protestantism is unjust
always. It made us narrow, unwilling to give credit to outsiders of
merit, and grossly indulgent to insiders of little or none. Certainly we
appreciated the Orientals, the Primitives, and savage art as they
had never been appreciated before; but we underrated the art of the
Renaissance and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Also,
because we set great store by our theories and sought their implications
everywhere, we claimed kinship with a literary movement with which,
in fact, we had nothing in common. Charles-Louis Philippe and the
Unanimistes should never have been compared with the descendants
of Cezanne. Happily, when it came to dragging in Tolstoyism, and
Dostoievskyism even, and making of the movement something moral and
political almost, the connection was seen to be ridiculous and was duly
cut.

The protagonists of the heroic epoch (1904--1914 shall we say?) were
Matisse and Picasso. In