nd a
treatment much recommended by the faculty is to take more interest in
art and less in one's own prestige. Above all, let us cultivate a sense
of proportion. Let us admire, for instance, the admirable, though
somewhat negative, qualities in the work of Mr. Lewis--the absence of
vulgarity and false sentiment, the sobriety of colour, the painstaking
search for design--without forgetting that in the Salon d'Automne or the
Salon des Independants a picture by him would neither merit nor obtain
from the most generous critic more than a passing word of perfunctory
encouragement; for in Paris there are perhaps five hundred men and
women--drawn from the four quarters of the earth--all trying to do what
Mr. Lewis tries to do, and doing it better.

ART AND POLITICS

Mr. Roger Fry, by means of an instructive tale (_Athenaeum_, August
13, 1920), has shown us that in their dealings with art Bolshevik
politicians remain true to type. Like the rest of their breed, they have
no use for it unless they can exploit it to their own ends. For my part,
I was never so simple as to suppose that, if the _de facto_ government
of Russia professed admiration for Matisse and Picasso, that admiration
had anything to do with the artistic gifts of either of these painters,
any more than that the respect with which the British Government treats
the names of Raphael and Michel Angelo should be taken to imply that any
single one of His Majesty's ministers has ever experienced an aesthetic
emotion. Consequently, I was not at all surprised to learn that the
sure, though unconscious, taste of the statesman had led the rulers of
Russia to reject their first loves; that instinctively they had divined
that both Matisse and Picasso were too much like genuine artists to be
trustworthy; and that they had, therefore, transferred their affections
to the thin, and fundamentally academic, work of Larionoff, which
should, I fancy, be just the thing for advanced politicians.

Some time ago, however, before Picasso was found out, a young Russian
aesthete--so Mr. Fry tells us--was licensed by the competent authority to
pronounce that artist's eulogy, on the understanding, of course, that
the lecture should somehow serve as a stick wherewith to beat the
opposition. Nothing easier: Picasso was pitted against Renoir. Picasso
was a great artist, because, abstract and austere, he was the man for
the proletariat; whereas Renoir, who painted pretty pictures for the
_b