y
affected by the influx of Oriental art. English painting, however, has
been left high and dry; and our younger men either imitate their
teachers, too often second-rate drawing masters, enjoying at best a dull
acquaintance with the Italian fifteenth and English eighteenth
centuries, or, in revolt, set up for themselves as independent, hedgerow
geniuses, ignorant, half-trained, and swollen by their prodigious
conceit to such monsters as vastly astonish all those who can remember
them as children.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that when men of talent make great men of
themselves, wrapping up in the cloak of genius and fronting the world
mysteriously, and when this attitude is tolerated by the public, there
is reason to suspect that art fares ill. Since every extension lecturer
knows that Raphael was part of a civilization greater than himself it
seems unnecessary to treat a fashionable portrait-painter as though he
were as inexplicable as an earthquake and as remote as the Matterhorn.
One of the things to be desired in England is more respect for art and
less reverence for artists.

English literature has a great tradition--the tradition of the greatest
literature in the world. I say that in ignorance, to be sure, of
Chinese, but not unmindful of Athenian. It would be inexact to describe
that tradition as part of the main continental tradition which, since
the middle of the seventeenth century, has been predominantly French,
coloured in the eighteenth century by English, in the early nineteenth
by German, and in the twentieth by Russian literature. Yet the English
tradition, rich and splendid as it is, has never allowed itself for long
to lose touch with the European current. The curious have only to turn
from the works of our young writers to those of Nietzsche, Dostoievsky,
Tchekov, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Claudel to appreciate the
sensitiveness of English literature, which has never fallen into that
insularity on which our lean visual art seems to pride itself. At
moments--in mid-Victorian days, for instance--English literature may
have appeared provincial; it was never suburban.

The tendency of British visual art to sink into a feeble barbarism seems
to have existed always and to have asserted itself whenever we lost
touch with the centre. The earliest English art, early Saxon sculpture,
is good; it is a respectable part of that great Byzantine tradition
which from the middle of the eighth to the middle