place (_Collection St. Cric_), be, indeed, palaeolithic, then there were
good palaeolithic artists who created and did not imitate form.
Neolithic art is, of course, a very different matter.]

[Footnote 3: Mr. Roger Fry permits me to make use of an interesting
story that will illustrate my view. When Mr. Okakura, the Government
editor of _The Temple Treasures of Japan_, first came to Europe, he
found no difficulty in appreciating the pictures of those who from want
of will or want of skill did not create illusions but concentrated their
energies on the creation of form. He understood immediately the
Byzantine masters and the French and Italian Primitives. In the
Renaissance painters, on the other hand, with their descriptive
pre-occupations, their literary and anecdotic interests, he could see
nothing but vulgarity and muddle. The universal and essential quality of
art, significant form, was missing, or rather had dwindled to a shallow
stream, overlaid and hidden beneath weeds, so the universal response,
aesthetic emotion, was not evoked. It was not till he came on to Henri
Matisse that he again found himself in the familiar world of pure art.
Similarly, sensitive Europeans who respond immediately to the
significant forms of great Oriental art, are left cold by the trivial
pieces of anecdote and social criticism so lovingly cherished by Chinese
dilettanti. It would be easy to multiply instances did not decency
forbid the labouring of so obvious a truth.]

[Footnote 4: Anyone who has visited the very latest French exhibitions
will have seen scores of what are called "Cubist" pictures. These afford
an excellent illustration of my thesis. Of a hundred cubist pictures
three or four will have artistic value. Thirty years ago the same might
have been said of "Impressionist" pictures; forty years before that of
romantic pictures in the manner of Delacroix. The explanation is
simple,--the vast majority of those who paint pictures have neither
originality nor any considerable talent. Left to themselves they would
probably produce the kind of painful absurdity which in England is known
as an "Academy picture." But a student who has no original gift may yet
be anything but a fool, and many students understand that the ordinary
cultivated picture-goer knows an "Academy picture" at a glance and knows
that it is bad. Is it fair to condemn severely a young painter for
trying to give his picture a factitious interest, or even for tryin