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CONTEMPORARY ART 211
and independent art ; but clearly she is doing
no such thing. There is no live tradition,
nothing
but fashions as stale as last week's
newspaper. All that is alive is a private
schoolboy rivalry, an ambition to be cock of
the walk or to ape the cock, to be primus inter
pares or amico di primus. There is no live
English tradition ; and as English painters
refuse obstinately to accept the European,
and as artists do not spring up unaccountably
as groundsel and dandelions appear to do,
this is a rather serious misfortune. Art does
not happen, it grows not necessarily in the
right direction. The fact that the development
of art traced through schools and movements
squares pretty well with historical fact
proves conclusively the existence of " influences
" in art. No one will deny that
Botticelli was an original and extremely personal
artist or that he is the obvious successor
of Lippo Lippi. El Greco is called by some
the most lonely figure in the history of art
it needs no wizard to divine that Titian
yet
was his master or that he was reared in the
Byzantine tradition. Artists, though they
hate being told so, are, in fact, like other
things, subject to the law of cause and effect.
Young artists, especially, are influenced by
their surroundings and by the past, particularly
the immediate past, by the men