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212 CONTEMPORARY ART
from five to thirty years older than them-
selves.
Art lives on tradition, of which contem-
porary culture is nothing but the last development.
But English artists, for the most part,
ignore the real tradition, and what passes
for
development here is no more, as a rule, than
a belated change of fashion. All that is vital
in modern art is being influenced by the
French masters Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh,
Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, Bonnard, Maillol,
who, in their turn, were influenced by the
and who all have been nourished
Impressionists,
by that great French tradition which, of
late, has been so surprisingly affected by the
influx of Oriental art. English painting,
however, has been left high and dry ;
and our
younger men either imitate their teachers,
too often second-rate drawing masters, enjoying
at best a dull acquaintance with the Italian
fifteenth and English eighteenth centuries, or,
in revolt, set up for themselves as independent,
hedgerow geniuses, ignorant, half-trained, and
swollen by their prodigious conceit to such
monsters as vastly astonish all those who can
remember them as children.
It is worth noting, perhaps, that when men
of talent make great men of themselves,
wrapping up in the cloak of genius and fronting
the world mysteriously, and when this attitude