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214
CONTEMPORARY ART
seems to pride itself. At moments in mid-
Victorian days, for instance English literature
may have appeared provincial ; it was
never suburban.
The tendency of British visual art to sink
into a feeble barbarism seems to have existed
always and to have asserted itself whenever
we lost touch with the centre. The earliest
English art, early Saxon sculpture, is good ;
it is a respectable part of that great Byzantine
tradition which from the middle of the eighth
to the middle of the ninth century appears to
have been as vital in the north of England and
in Ireland as in any part of Western Europe.
The Normans kept England close to the centre
and left us a little superb architecture ; but
from the beginning of the thirteenth century
English visual art architecture, painting, and
sculpture begins to take on that absurd air
of being out of it which has since become the
unfailing characteristic of an exhibition of
home-made arts and crafts. In the seventeenth
century we again got into touch with the movement
and the genius of Inigo Jones and Wren
gave us some admirable architecture. In the
eighteenth we produced two painters of note,
Blake and Crome, both of whom suffered
desperately from their deplorable surroundings.
What was interesting in Constable and Turner
was seized and made use of more quickly and