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2i6 CONTEMPORARY ART
would such conversation be hard to come by :
there one might learn that Mr. Smith was a
greater genius than Miss Jones, that Mrs.
Robinson would never finish her picture in
time for the New English Exhibition, that
Mr. John was the greatest painter in the world
though Mr. Innes had once run him hard
and that the greatest sculptor was some one
whose name I cannot recall. Of contemporary
French painting at most a perfunctory word ;
yet to ignore it is to put oneself beyond the
pale of contemporary culture. And there, it
seems, is just where we must look for English
art ; in European civilization it has no place.
It is out of it ; it is suburban.
Educated people, enjoying some knowledge
of what has been happening abroad during the
last
fifty years, can scarcely
conceive the
ignorance and insularity of contemporary
British painters. It was only the other day
that one of the best of them, fired by Mr. Roger
Fry's article in the Burlington Magazine, walked
into the National Gallery and saw for the first
time a Renoir. He was duly impressed ; and
hurried off, I am glad to say, to buy a book of
reproductions. Another promising painter,
who was in Paris just before the war, not only
never saw a Cezanne, a Gauguin, a Matisse or
a Picasso, but was equally neglectful of the
Impressionist masters, never taking the trouble