Download File

CONTEMPORARY ART 225
its too willing aloofness from foreign influences,
its tendency to concentrate on a mediocre and
rather middle-class ideal of honesty, it is, I
suspect, typically British. There is nothing
Tennysonian about these men, nothing Kiplingesque
; their art is neither meretricious
nor conceited ; but it reminds one oddly of
perpendicular architecture.
These are the men that might profit by
good criticism, for they are intelligent and
fair-minded. Alas ! English criticism is more
woefully out of it than painting even. The
ignorance of our critics is appafiing. 1 Seven
years ago there was brought over to London
a collection of
pictures by C6zanne, Gauguin,
and Van Gogh. Every man and woman on
the Continent who claimed acquaintance with
modern art had already come to some conclusion
about these painters whose works were
in the public collections of Germany and the
North and in the private collections of directors
of French galleries. Some thought that they
took rank amongst the very great painters of
the world ; others that there was a general
disposition to overrate them ; no one denied
that they were considerable men or that
1 There are, of course, exceptions. The critics of the
Times, the Westminster Gazette, and the Evening Standard,
for instance, are neither ignorant nor stupid ; but they are
all, one fancief, hampered by nervous and ill-educated
editors.