e by
Paganini. But with all his transcendental virtuosity the Welsh painter
is never academic; he is often rank in his expression of humanity,
human, all-too-human, as Nietzsche would have said. A great
personality (with greater potentialities) is that of Augustus John.
But aside from his powerful personality and remarkable craftsmanship,
who is there that can't be matched by our own men? There are no
landscapists like ours--is it necessary to count them off name by
name? Neither are our figure-painters excelled. I know comparisons are
not courteous, and I forbear particularising. John S. Sargent, our
greatest painter of surfaces, of the mundane scene, was not even born
here, though he is of American parentage. Nevertheless, we claim him.
Then there is Whistler, most elusive of our artists. Is he American?
That question has been answered. He is, even if he deals with foreign
subject-matter. Wonderfully wrought, magically coloured, rich and dim,
are his pictures, and one, to employ the phrase of an English critic,
is fain to believe that his brush was dipped in mist, not pigment.

Let us be catholic. Let us try to shift anew the focus of criticism
when a fresh personality swims into our ken. Let us study each man
according to his temperament and not insist that he should chime with
other men's music. The Beckmesser style of awarding good and bad marks
is obsolete. To miss modern art is to miss one of the few thrills that
life holds. Your true decadent copies the past and closes his eyes to
the insistent vibrations of his day. I know that it is not every one
who can enjoy Botticelli and Monet, Duerer and Manet, Rembrandt and
Matisse. Ready-made admiration is fatal to youthful minds;
nevertheless, we should, all of us, old as well as young--particularly
the academic elderly--cultivate a broader comprehension of the later
schools and personalities. Art is protean. But will, I ask myself,
posterity sit before the masterpieces of Matisse, Picasso, and Van
Dongen, and experience that nostalgia of the ideal of which I wrote at
the beginning of these desultory notes? Why not? There may be other
ideals in those remote times, ideals that may be found incarnate in
some new-fangled tremendous Gehenna. But nature will always remain
modern.

II

THE ITALIAN FUTURIST PAINTERS

Because I had strolled over to buy a newspaper at a kiosk hard by the
Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, I d