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CONTEMPORARY ART 227
Our critics and teachers provided, and continue
to provide, an artistic education com-
parable with the historical education provided
by our board-schools. People who have been
brought up to believe that the history of
England is the history of Europe that it is a
tale of unbroken victory, leadership, and
power feel, when they hear of the ascendancy
of France or of the House of Austria or of the
till the
comparative insignificance of England
dawn of the eighteenth century, angry first
and then incredulous. So they give themselves
the least possible chance of hearing such
unpalatable nonsense by living snugly in the
slums and suburbs, where, persuaded that they
have nothing to learn from damned foreigners,
they continue to entertain each other with
scraps of local and personal gossip. That is
what our art criticism sounds like to cultivated
people from abroad.
A few months ago an extraordinarily fine
Renoir, a recognized masterpiece of modern
art, was hung in the National Gallery. Any
young painter who may have seen and profited
by it need not thank those directors of public
taste, the critics. It was passed by in silence
or with a nod by the bulk of our paid experts,
who were much more pleased by a
particularly
poor but very large Puvis, which possibly
reminded them in some obscure way of a pre-