of the ninth century
appears to have been as vital in the north of England and in Ireland as
in any part of Western Europe. The Normans kept England close to the
centre and left us a little superb architecture; but from the beginning
of the thirteenth century English visual art--architecture, painting,
and sculpture--begins to take on that absurd air of being out of it
which has since become the unfailing characteristic of an exhibition of
home-made arts and crafts. In the seventeenth century we again got into
touch with the movement and the genius of Inigo Jones and Wren gave us
some admirable architecture. In the eighteenth we produced two painters
of note, Blake and Crome, both of whom suffered desperately from their
deplorable surroundings. What was interesting in Constable and Turner
was seized and made use of more quickly and far more intelligently by
French than by native artists. Here they were treated as isolated
geniuses; there they were absorbed into the tradition of painting.

A student of contemporary art who found himself in the company of
painters and amateurs in any great central city abroad--Paris,
Stockholm, Copenhagen, Moscow, Munich, Vienna, Geneva, Milan, or
Barcelona--would be able to discuss, and doubtless would discuss, the
contemporary movement. That movement, as every one outside England seems
to know, radiates from France. He would discuss, therefore, the
respective merits of Matisse, Picasso, Marquet, Marchand, Friesz,
Derain, Bonnard, de Vlaminck, Maillol, Laprade, Segonzac, Delaunay, etc.
etc.; and not only discuss and criticize their works, but the direction
in which each was moving, the influence of one on another, and the
influence of Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, or the _douanier_ Rousseau on
all. Such a company would know something about the development of the
movement in other countries; it would have something to say about
Kandinsky and the Munich painters, about Goncharova and Larionoff, about
the Barcelona school, and even about the Italian futurists. In a word,
it would be able to talk about contemporary European painting. Only in
an English studio would such conversation be hard to come by: there one
might learn that Mr. Smith was a greater genius than Miss Jones, that
Mrs. Robinson would never finish her picture in time for the New English
Exhibition, that Mr. John was the greatest painter in the world--though
Mr. Innes had once run him hard--and that the greatest sculptor was some