ies who were attempting
to solve new artistic problems I could understand it. Young writers wax
over-enthusiastic about Laforgue and Charles-Louis Philippe--both of
whom, by the way, died some years ago--and are not much to blame on that
account; neither should I have the least difficulty in forgiving myself
were it to turn out--as it will not--that I had said too much in praise
of Matisse or Picasso. The artist who even appears to have discovered or
rediscovered an instrument of expression or to have extended by one
semitone the gamut of aesthetic experience is bound to turn the best
heads of his age. Were it possible to overrate Cezanne, not to do so
would be a mark of insensibility. I was never much impressed by those
superior persons of an earlier age who from the first saw through
Wagner; there was a time when to dislike Wagner was, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, a sign not of superiority but of stupidity. The
artists, however, whom Mr. Bennett belauds so uncritically, are not of
this sort. In my judgment, Mr. Wells, Mr. George Moore, and the late Sir
John Galsworthy are not artists at all: be that as it may, past question
they are artistically conventional and thoroughly in the tradition of
British fiction. Of course they write of motor-cars and telephones where
an older generation wrote of railway-trains and telegrams, and of the
_deuxiemes_, _troisiemes_ or _quatre-vingt-dixiemes_ where their
grandmothers wrote of _les premiers amours_; also, they can refer to the
Almighty in the third person without bursting into capitals. But in this
there is no more artistic novelty than there would be in a picture of an
aeroplane painted in the manner of Ingres. Neither is there any
discredit; very much the same might be said of our three best living
novelists--Hardy, Conrad, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom are more or
less traditional, as is Anatole France, perhaps the best novelist
alive. A first-rate unconventional work of art is not a straw better
than a conventional one, and to become slightly light-headed about
either is not only permissible but seemly. Nevertheless, to go silly
over a mediocre innovation is far more excusable than to be taken in by
its equivalent in a familiar style. While to rave about Messrs. Wells,
Moore and Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no
difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the
Republic of Letters--a state, let us try to remember, that not