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CONTEMPORARY ART 213
is tolerated by the public, there is reason to
suspect that art fares ill. Since every extension
lecturer knows that Raphael was part of
a civilization greater than himself it seems
unnecessary to treat a fashionable portraitpainter
as though he were as inexplicable as
an earthquake and as remote as the Matterhorn.
One of the things to be desired in
England is more respect
reverence for artists.
for art and less
English literature has a great tradition the
tradition of the greatest literature in the
world. I say that in ignorance, to be sure,
of Chinese, but not unmindful of Athenian.
It would be inexact to describe that tradition
as part of the main continental tradition which,
since the middle of the seventeenth century,
has been predominantly French, coloured in
the eighteenth century by English, in the
early nineteenth by German, and in the
twentieth by Russian literature. Yet the
English tradition, rich and splendid as it is,
has never allowed itself for long to lose touch
with the European current. The curious have
only to turn from the works of our young
writers to those of Nietzsche, Dostoievsky,
Tchekov, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and
Claudel to appreciate the sensitiveness of
English literature, which has never fallen into
that insularity on which our lean visual art