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FOREWORD ii
is bound to turn the best heads of
perience
his age. Were it possible to overrate Cezanne,
not to do so would be a mark of insensibility.
I was never much impressed by those superior
persons of an earlier age who from the first saw
through Wagner there was a time when to
;
dislike Wagner was, in ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred, a sign not of superiority but of
stupidity. The artists, however, whom Mr.
Bennett belauds so uncritically, are not of
this sort. In my judgment Mr. Wells, Mr.
George Moore, and the late Sir John Galsworthy
are not artists at all : be that as it
may, past question they are artistically conventional
and thoroughly in the tradition of
British fiction. Of course they write of
motor-cars and telephones where an older
generation wrote of railway-trains and telegrams,
and of the deuxiemes, troisilmes or
quatre-vingt-dixi ernes where their grandmothers
wrote of les 'premiers amours \ also, they can
refer to the Almighty in the third person
without bursting into capitals. But in this
there is no more artistic novelty than there
would be in a picture of an aeroplane painted
in the manner of Ingres. Neither is there any
discredit ; very much the same might be said
of our three best living novelists Hardy,
Conrad, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom are
more or less traditional, as is Anatole France,