ess to the genius of
their medium. They do not love paint and caress it with a sensuous
instinct for its exquisite potentialities. They know nothing of the
beauty of surface. Nor, by the same token, have they awakened to the
lesson which Manet so admirably enforced of the magic that lies in
pure colour for those who really know how to use it." I can hear our
German friend discoursing on the subject of surface beauty! For him
the underlying philosophic "idea," whatever that has to do with
paint, is his shibboleth, and behold the result. Moreover, the German
has not naturally a colour sense. It is only such a man as Reinhardt,
with the Oriental feeling for sumptuous hues, that has succeeded in
emancipating the German theatre from its garish taste. Some day the
Richard Wagner music-drama will be renovated on the scenic
side--Roller in Vienna has made a decided step in the right
direction--and the old Munich travesties, which Wagner thought he
wanted, will be relegated to the limbo of meretricious art.

III

Fancying, perhaps, that I had not been quite fair to modern German
painters--later I may consider the ghastly sculpture which, like that
cemetery of stone dolls and idols, the Siegesallee in the Berlin
Tiergarten, has paralysed plastic art in that country--I determined
early in the autumn of 1912 to visit again the principal cities, going
as far down as Vienna and Budapest. I do not mind confessing that the
thought of the glorious Jan Vermeer in the National Museum in the
Magyar capital greatly tempted me. And to get an abiding pictorial
flavour in my mind I began visiting The Hague, Haarlem, and Amsterdam.
Any one who can admire modern German art after a course of Rembrandt,
Hals, Vermeer, Josef Israels, and the brothers Maris (all three
melting colourists), must have the powerful if somewhat uncritical
stomach of an ostrich.

Leaving Holland, I found myself in London, and there, to add further
to my distraction, I spent weeks at the National Gallery and the
Wallace Collection. So I was ripe for revolt when I began at
Stuttgart. While still in the rich tonal meshes of the Richard Strauss
music, I wandered one grey afternoon into an exhibition of the
Stuttgarter Kuenstlerbund. There were plenty of new names, but, alas!
no new talent, only a sea of muddy paint, without nuance, clumsy
drawing, harsh flesh-tints, and landscapes of chemical greens. Why
mention names? Not even mediocrit