o follow as best it can.

But this difference between the atmosphere of London and of Paris
brings up a question that had best be stated at once. What are the
causes of British provincialism? Though its existence is a fact that
runs right through the history of British art, it would be rash to
assume that the causes have always been the same. For instance, the
geographical isolation of England may at one time have been a cause;
that has been removed by railways and steamboats. It will be sensible to
speak in this article only of present causes of present ills.

Some people will have it that the insignificance of English art is very
simply to be explained by a complete absence of native talent; but the
mere inspection of English children's and students' work suffices to
dispose of this too convenient hypothesis. In no country, perhaps,
except France, is there more of that raw material from which good art is
made. More plausible is the theory that the vast and towering greatness
of English literature overhangs and starves all other forms of
expression. In such a land as this it seems natural that any sense of
art or power of creation should drift towards literature, and almost
inevitable that the painters themselves should be half poets at heart,
hardly convinced of the intrinsic value of their own medium, tending
ever to substitute literary for plastic significance. Every critic is on
the watch for a literary symbol and the chance of an allegorical
interpretation, every cultivated amateur is eager to spy out an adroitly
placed anecdote or shaft of pictorial satire; only with great pains is
any one induced to regard a picture as an independent creation of form.
In so literary a society it seems paradoxical almost to believe in pure
painting; and, in despair, we cry out that no country can be expected to
excel, at one time, in two arts. We forget Athens and Tuscany; we also
forget France. For more than two hundred years France has led the visual
art of Europe; and if English painting were ever to become one-tenth
part as good as French literature I, for my part, should be as pleased
as surprised. Of music I say nothing; yet in that art too France was
beginning, just before the war, to challenge, not very formidably
perhaps, the pre-eminence of Germany and to stand as the fair rival of
Russia.

What hampers English artists most is, unless I mistake, the atmosphere
in which they work. In France--in Germany too, they say--t