," it seems to me he would have done what he wanted
to do, and done it better.

What gives even minor Frenchmen an advantage over the English is
artistic courage. They will be themselves at all costs, even at the risk
of pleasing old ladies from the country, or passing unnoticed. Asselin
goes farther than Nevinson with less ability. Yet Nevinson bears the
Briton's burden more lightly than his fellows; probably because he is
cleverer than most of them. He is clever enough to pick up some one
else's style with fatal ease; is he not clever enough to diagnose the
malady and discover a cure? If I were older, I would advise Nevinson and
the more intelligent of this company to shut themselves up for six
months, and paint pictures that no one was ever going to see. They might
catch themselves doing something more personal if less astonishing than
what they are showing at the Dore Galleries. Artistic courage, that is
what is wanted--courage to create the forms that express oneself instead
of imitating those that express the people for whom one would gladly be
mistaken.

III

AN EXPENSIVE "MASTERPIECE"

[Sidenote: _New Statesman July 1914_]

Because we all know stories of first-rate works of art having been
offered at ridiculously low prices to English galleries and museums and
refused by them on the ground that there was no money even for the
purchase of what was very good and very cheap, we are surprised and even
excited when we hear that a big price (some say as much as L5000) has
been paid for a Chinese pottery figure. And those of us who have the
fortune to belong to the privileged, and therefore well-behaved, sex
hurry off to see what Mr. Hobson describes in the May number of the
_Burlington Magazine_ as "a new Chinese masterpiece in the British
Museum."

Mr. Hobson is a sound archaeologist; consequently it is impossible to
read his careful and admirably frank article without surmising that he
himself feels some qualms of suspicion about the date, if not the
beauty, of his treasure. For us the first question to be asked is: "Is
this a fine work of art?" For Mr. Hobson I suppose the first care was
to decide whether or no the thing was T'ang. His is the sound, the
scientific, the archaeological method; and I feel sure he followed it
because it is the archaeological method, and because, had he followed the
unscientific, aesthetic method, and considered first the style and
artistic worth of this figure, he would