tzsche is right; in certain matters the Germans are
the Chinese of Europe; they refuse to see the light of modern
discoveries in art.

Here is a violent instance: On the top floor of the National Gallery,
Berlin, there is a room with fourteen masterpieces on its walls.
Nothing in the galleries below--not even Zorn's Maja--nothing in all
Berlin, excepting the old masters in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, can
be mentioned in the same breath with these beautiful compositions,
condemned to perpetual twilight. They were secured by the late and
lamented Von Tschudi, who left the National Gallery after their
purchase and retired to Munich, where he bought a great example of El
Greco for the old Pinakothek, the Laocoon, a service, I fancy, not
quite appreciated by the burghers of Munich. The masters who have thus
fallen under the ban of official displeasure are Manet, Monet,
Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Cezanne--the latter represented by two
of the most veracious fruit-pieces I ever saw. The Manet is the famous
Hothouse, and in the semi-darkness (not a ray of artificial light is
permitted) I noted that the canvas had mellowed with the years. The
Monets are of rare quality. Altogether a magnificent object-lesson for
young Germany, in which tender colour, an exquisite vision (poetic
without being sloppy-sentimental) of the animate and inanimate world.
What a lesson for those rough daubers who growl at the dandyism of the
Frenchmen, whose landscapes look like diagrams, surveyors' maps, or
what-not; painters who, if they were told that they are not knee-high
to a grasshopper when their pictures are set side by side with
American landscapists, would roar as if at a good joke; and a lesson
that will never be learned by the present generation, which believes
that Max Klinger is a great etcher, a great sculptor (only think of
that terrifying Beethoven statue in Leipsic), that Boecklin is a great
poet as well as a marvellous painter, that--oh, what's the use! The
nation that produced such world masters as Albrecht Duerer, Hans
Holbein, Lucas Cranach, and the German Primitives has seemingly lost
its lien in sound art.

Remember, I am not arguing with you, as Jemmy Whistler puts it, I'm
just telling you; these things are not a matter of taste, but a matter
of fact, of rotten bad paint. What Royal Cortissoz wrote of the German
Exhibition and of the Scandinavians when in New York fits into this
space with appositeness: "... an insensitiven