one whose name I cannot recall. Of contemporary French painting at most
a perfunctory word; yet to ignore it is to put oneself beyond the pale
of contemporary culture. And there, it seems, is just where we must look
for English art; in European civilization it has no place. It is out of
it; it is suburban.

Educated people, enjoying some knowledge of what has been happening
abroad during the last fifty years, can scarcely conceive the ignorance
and insularity of contemporary British painters. It was only the other
day that one of the best of them, fired by Mr. Roger Fry's article in
the _Burlington Magazine_, walked into the National Gallery and saw for
the first time a Renoir. He was duly impressed; and hurried off, I am
glad to say, to buy a book of reproductions. Another promising painter,
who was in Paris just before the war, not only never saw a Cezanne, a
Gauguin, a Matisse or a Picasso, but was equally neglectful of the
Impressionist masters, never taking the trouble to visit the Luxembourg
and inspect the Caillebotte bequest. Imagine a continental man of
science who in 1880 had never taken the trouble to read "The Origin of
Species" or investigate the theory of evolution!

The state of mind produced in most English painters by this outlandish
ignorance is calamitous. Unconscious of what is going on abroad, dimly,
at best, aware of what has been done in the past, and lacking effective,
well-informed criticism from writers in the newspapers and from their
fellow-artists, they work without standards, ideals or artistic
seriousness, and soon fall into that ghastly complacency in which a man
is content to satisfy the market with endless repetition of some popular
success. Modesty is a virtue hardly attainable by the prize student from
the Slade or the Academy who is persuaded that in a few years he will be
the prize painter of the world, and is, in a few years, by press and
public duly confirmed in his delusion. His first ambition will be to get
a picture accepted by the Royal Academy or the New English Art Club, his
next to wheedle the quidnuncs--i.e. the newspaper men--into giving him a
place amongst the local worthies, his last to discover a formula that
shall be the strong-box of his lucky hit. This accomplished, commissions
and paragraphs begin to roll in with comfortable regularity, and he
rests replete--a leading British artist. Is he ever plagued with
nightmares, I wonder, in which he dreams that outside En