ns and, perhaps, as much as Russians. Yet it is a
fact that their work, by reason of its inveterate suburbanity, so wholly
lacks significance and seriousness that an impartial historian, who
could not neglect the mediocre products of North and East Europe, would
probably dismiss English painting in a couple of paragraphs. For it is
not only poor; it is provincial: and provincial art, as the historian
well knows, never really counts.

It would be pleasant to fancy that England was working out, in
isolation, an interesting and independent art; but clearly she is doing
no such thing. There is no live tradition, nothing but fashions as stale
as last week's newspaper. All that is alive is a private schoolboy
rivalry, an ambition to be cock of the walk or to ape the cock, to be
_primus inter pares_ or _amico di primus_. There is no live English
tradition; and as English painters refuse obstinately to accept the
European, and as artists do not spring up unaccountably as groundsel and
dandelions appear to do, this is a rather serious misfortune. Art does
not happen, it grows--not necessarily in the right direction. The fact
that the development of art traced through schools and movements squares
pretty well with historical fact proves conclusively the existence of
"influences" in art. No one will deny that Botticelli was an original
and extremely personal artist or that he is the obvious successor of
Lippo Lippi. El Greco is called by some the most lonely figure in the
history of art--yet it needs no wizard to divine that Titian was his
master or that he was reared in the Byzantine tradition. Artists, though
they hate being told so, are, in fact, like other things, subject to the
law of cause and effect. Young artists, especially, are influenced by
their surroundings and by the past, particularly the immediate past, by
the men from five to thirty years older than themselves.

Art lives on tradition, of which contemporary culture is nothing but the
last development. But English artists, for the most part, ignore the
real tradition, and what passes for development here is no more, as a
rule, than a belated change of fashion. All that is vital in modern art
is being influenced by the French masters--Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh,
Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, Bonnard, Maillol, who, in their turn, were
influenced by the Impressionists, and who all have been nourished by
that great French tradition which, of late, has been so surprisingl