that mysterious yet recognizable quality in which the art of Raffael
excels--a calm, disinterested, and professional concern with the
significance of life as revealed directly in form, a faint desire,
perhaps, to touch by a picture, a building, or a simple object of use
some curious over-tone of our aesthetic sense. Deep in their quest of
that borderland beauty which is common to life and art French painters
are once again deeply concerned with life: to borrow an idea from my
next essay, they have chosen a new artistic problem. To them,
however, "life" does not mean what it means to the sentimentalists or
melodramatists, nor even precisely what it meant to the Impressionists.
Contemporary French painting has no taste for contemporary actualities.
By "life" it understands, not what is going on in the street, but--what
to be sure does go on there because it goes on everywhere--the thing
that poets used to call "the animating spark." About life, in that
sense, the painters of the new generation will, I fancy, have something
to say. They will come at it, not by drama or anecdote or symbol, but,
as all genuine artists have always come at whatever possessed their
imaginations, by plastic expression, or--if you like old-fashioned
phrases--by creating significant form. They will seek the vital
principle in all sorts of objects and translate it into forms of every
kind. That humane beauty after which Derain strives is to be found, I
said, in Raffael: it is to be found also in the Parthenon.

I think this preliminary essay should close, as it began, on a note
of humility and with an explanation. Twenty years ago, when I was an
undergraduate, I remember reading just after it was published M. Camille
Mauclair's little book on the Impressionists. Long ago I ceased much
to admire M. Mauclair's writing: his theorizing and pseudo-science now
strike me as silly, and his judgements seem lacking in perspicacity. But
whatever I may think of it now I shall not forget what I owe that book.
Even at Cambridge the spirit of the age, which is said to pervade the
air like a pestilence, had infected me; and I set out on my first
visit to Paris full of curiosity about what was then the contemporary
movement--at its last gasp. My guide was M. Mauclair; his book it was
that put me in the right way. For by bringing me acquainted with
current theories and reputations, and by throwing me into a fever of
expectation, he brought my aesthetic sensibilities