. I do not know whether Bissiere is to be ranked amongst
his disciples--I should think not--but Bissiere, a most attractive
artist, is perhaps significant of the new tendency in that he has chosen
to express a whimsical temperament in terms of prim science. About the
science of picture-making, as the director of the National Gallery
calls it, he has little to learn. He knows the masters, the Primitives
especially, and has a way, at once logical and fantastic, of playing on
their _motifs_ which gives sometimes the happiest results. Bissiere is
too fanciful and odd ever to be a _chef d'ecole_ or representative even;
but the very fact that, being what he is, he has chosen such means of
expression is symptomatic.

So the doctrinaire side of the movement persists, animated by Picasso,
and schooled to some extent by Lhote. The main current, however, has
found another channel; and, unless I mistake, we are already in the
second phase of the movement--a phase in which the revelations of
Cezanne and Seurat and the elaborations of their immediate descendants
will be modified and revitalized by the pressure and spirit of the great
tradition. The leader has already been chosen. Derain is the chief
of the new French school--a school destined manifestly to be less
cosmopolitan than its predecessor. The tendency towards nationalism
everywhere is unmistakeable--a consequence of the war, I suppose. It is
useless to deplore the fact or exult in it: one can but accept it as one
accepts the weather. Even England has not escaped; and it is to be noted
that our best painter, Duncan Grant, a descendant of Cezanne who has run
the whole gamut of abstract experiment, is settling down, without of
course for a moment denying his master, to exploit the French heritage,
with feet planted firmly in the English tradition--the tradition of
Gainsborough and Constable. In France, where tradition is so much
richer, its weight will confine more closely and drive more intensely
the new spirit. One new tendency--that which insists more passionately
than ever on order and organization--merely continues the impetus given
by Cezanne and received by all his followers; but another, more vague,
towards something which I had rather call humanism than humanity, does
imply, I think, a definite breach with Cubism and the tenets of the
austerer doctrinaires. It is not drama or anecdote or sentiment or
symbolism that this would bring back to the plastic arts, but rather