as if they were
comparing Cezanne with Renoir. It is more than disquieting, it is
alarming, to detect symptoms of the disease--this distressing disease
of Wilcoxism--in _The Athenaeum_ itself. Yet I am positive that not long
since I read in this very paper that Mr. Wyndham Lewis was more than a
match for Matisse and Derain; and, having said so much, the critic not
unnaturally went on to suggest that he was a match for Lionardo da
Vinci. Since then I have trembled weekly lest the infection should have
spread to our literary parts. Will it be asserted, one of these Fridays,
that the appetizing novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan are distinctly better
than Hardy's Wessex tales, and comparable rather with the works of Jane
Austen?

To save ourselves from absurdity, and still more to save our painters
from inspissating that trickle of fatuity which wells from heads swollen
with hot air, critics should set themselves to check this nasty malady.
Let them make it clear that to talk of modern English painting as though
it were the rival of modern French is silly. In old racing days--how
matters stand now I know not--it used to be held that French form was
about seven pounds below English: the winner of the Derby, that is to
say, could generally give the best French colt about that weight and a
beating. In painting, English form is normally a stone below French. At
any given moment the best painter in England is unlikely to be better
than a first-rate man in the French second class. Whistler was never a
match for Renoir, Degas, Seurat, and Manet; but Whistler, Steer, and
Sickert may profitably be compared with Boudin, Jongkind, and Berthe
Morisot. And though Duncan Grant holds his own handsomely with Marchand,
Vlaminck, Lhote, de Segonzac, Bracque and Modigliani, I am not yet
prepared to class him with Matisse, Picasso, Derain, and Bonnard.

Having bravely recognized this disagreeable truth, let us take as much
interest in contemporary British painting as we can. I will try to
believe that it merits more enthusiasm than I have been able to show,
provided it is not made a point of patriotism to excite oneself about
the Imperial War Museum's pictures exhibited at Burlington House. As
a matter of fact, the most depressing thing about that show was the
absence of the very quality for which British art has been most justly
admired--I mean sensibility. Mr. Wilson Steer's picture seemed to me the
best in the place, just because Mr. Steer has