and dislikes, fancies and
prejudices, have nothing whatever to do with art.

Behind the patrons and their decorators there is, of course, that odd
little world sometimes called Bohemia, about which very little need be
said. Every master, be he academician, New Englisher, or comic
illustrator, is followed by a tail of lads and lasses whose business it
is to sing the great man's praises and keep up, in the face of
disheartening indifference, the pathetic tradition of British
immorality. They give tips to the critics sometimes, but no one else
marks them.

Such being the public, not unnaturally the more serious and independent
painters endeavour to set up small coteries of their own as far from
Mayfair and the Chelsea embankment as possible. Thus arose the Camden
Town group under Mr. Sickert, thus arose the Friday Club and the London
group. And here we may pause in our miserable and comminatory progress
to admit gladly that in such societies are to be found plenty of talent
and of what is much rarer, sincerity. Here are men who take art
seriously; here are men who have no prospective sitter, no rich patron,
no terrible drawing-master in mind; here are men to whom painting is the
most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation
they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar
provincialism; but in its lack of receptivity, its too willing
aloofness from foreign influences, its tendency to concentrate on a
mediocre and rather middle-class ideal of honesty, it is, I suspect,
typically British. There is nothing Tennysonian about these men, nothing
Kiplingesque; their art is neither meretricious nor conceited; but it
reminds one oddly of perpendicular architecture.

These are the men that might profit by good criticism, for they are
intelligent and fair-minded. Alas! English criticism is more woefully
out of it than painting even. The ignorance of our critics is
appalling.[22] Seven years ago there was brought over to London a
collection of pictures by Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Every man and
woman on the Continent who claimed acquaintance with modern art had
already come to some conclusion about these painters whose works were in
the public collections of Germany and the North and in the private
collections of directors of French galleries. Some thought that they
took rank amongst the very great painters of the world; others that
there was a general disposition to overrate them