to the Impressionists.  Contemporary French painting has no taste for contemporary actualities.  By “life” it understands, not what is going on in the street, but—­what to be sure does go on there because it goes on everywhere—­the thing that poets used to call “the animating spark.”  About life, in that sense, the painters of the new generation will, I fancy, have something to say.  They will come at it, not by drama or anecdote or symbol, but, as all genuine artists have always come at whatever possessed their imaginations, by plastic expression, or—­if you like old-fashioned phrases—­by creating significant form.  They will seek the vital principle in all sorts of objects and translate it into forms of every kind.  That humane beauty after which Derain strives is to be found, I said, in Raffael:  it is to be found also in the Parthenon.

I think this preliminary essay should close, as it began, on a note of humility and with an explanation.  Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I remember reading just after it was published M. Camille Mauclair’s little book on the Impressionists.  Long ago I ceased much to admire M. Mauclair’s writing:  his theorizing and pseudo-science now strike me as silly, and his judgements seem lacking in perspicacity.  But whatever I may think of it now I shall not forget what I owe that book.  Even at Cambridge the spirit of the age, which is said to pervade the air like a pestilence, had infected me; and I set out on my first visit to Paris full of curiosity about what was then the contemporary movement—­at its last gasp.  My guide was M. Mauclair; his book it was that put me in the right way.  For by bringing me acquainted with current theories and reputations, and by throwing me into a fever of expectation, he brought my aesthetic sensibilities to that state in which they reacted swiftly and generously to the pictures themselves.  This, as I shall explain in another essay, is, to my mind, the proper function of criticism.  I shall never forget my first visits to the Caillebotte collection; and in the unforgettable thrill of those first visits M. Mauclair’s bad science and erratic judgement counted for something—­much perhaps.  They put me into a mood of sympathetic expectation; and such a mood is, even for highly sensitive people, often an indispensable preliminary to aesthetic appreciation.  There are those who have got to be made to feel something before they can begin to feel for themselves—­believe me, they are not the least sensitive or genuine of amateurs:  they are only the most honest.  I should like very much to do for even one of them what M. Mauclair did for me.  It would be delightful to believe that by putting him in the way of the best modern painting and the theories concerning or connected with it—­theories which, it seems, for some make it more intelligible—­I was giving his sensibility a serviceable jog.  Everyone, I know, must see with his own eyes and feel through his own nerves; none can lend another eyes or emotions: