of the new tendency in that he has chosen to express a whimsical temperament in terms of prim science.  About the science of picture-making, as the director of the National Gallery calls it, he has little to learn.  He knows the masters, the Primitives especially, and has a way, at once logical and fantastic, of playing on their motifs which gives sometimes the happiest results.  Bissiere is too fanciful and odd ever to be a chef d’ecole or representative even; but the very fact that, being what he is, he has chosen such means of expression is symptomatic.

So the doctrinaire side of the movement persists, animated by Picasso, and schooled to some extent by Lhote.  The main current, however, has found another channel; and, unless I mistake, we are already in the second phase of the movement—­a phase in which the revelations of Cezanne and Seurat and the elaborations of their immediate descendants will be modified and revitalized by the pressure and spirit of the great tradition.  The leader has already been chosen.  Derain is the chief of the new French school—­a school destined manifestly to be less cosmopolitan than its predecessor.  The tendency towards nationalism everywhere is unmistakeable—­a consequence of the war, I suppose.  It is useless to deplore the fact or exult in it:  one can but accept it as one accepts the weather.  Even England has not escaped; and it is to be noted that our best painter, Duncan Grant, a descendant of Cezanne who has run the whole gamut of abstract experiment, is settling down, without of course for a moment denying his master, to exploit the French heritage, with feet planted firmly in the English tradition—­the tradition of Gainsborough and Constable.  In France, where tradition is so much richer, its weight will confine more closely and drive more intensely the new spirit.  One new tendency—­that which insists more passionately than ever on order and organization—­merely continues the impetus given by Cezanne and received by all his followers; but another, more vague, towards something which I had rather call humanism than humanity, does imply, I think, a definite breach with Cubism and the tenets of the austerer doctrinaires.  It is not drama or anecdote or sentiment or symbolism that this would bring back to the plastic arts, but rather that mysterious yet recognizable quality in which the art of Raffael excels—­a calm, disinterested, and professional concern with the significance of life as revealed directly in form, a faint desire, perhaps, to touch by a picture, a building, or a simple object of use some curious over-tone of our aesthetic sense.  Deep in their quest of that borderland beauty which is common to life and art French painters are once again deeply concerned with life:  to borrow an idea from my next essay, they have chosen a new artistic problem.  To them, however, “life” does not mean what it means to the sentimentalists or melodramatists, nor even precisely what it meant