Only in France, so far as I know, are the men who are working out the heritage of Cezanne allowed to be artists and expected to be nothing more.  Elsewhere, the public by its uncritical attitude seems to encourage them to pose as supermen or to become rebels.  Assuredly I am not advocating that slightly fatuous open-mindedness which led some Germans to seize on the movement before it was well grown and deal with it as they have dealt with so many others, collecting its artists as though they were beetles, bottling them, setting them, cataloguing them, making no mistake about them, and arranging them neatly in museums for the dust to settle on.  Organized alertness of that sort is only less depressing than the smartness of those Italians who pounced so promptly on the journalistic possibilities of the movement as a means of self-advertisement.  All I ask for in the public is a little more intelligence and sensibility, and a more critical attitude.  Surely, by now, it should be impossible to hear what I heard only the other day—­Mr. Charles Shannon being extolled, to humiliate some enterprising student, as a “traditional artist.”  Why, it would be as sensible to call the man who makes nest-eggs a traditional Buff Orpington!  And ought it still to be possible for a cultivated dealer, because I had refused to admire a stale old crust by some young New English painter, who, to be in the movement, had misshaped a few conventionally drawn objects and put black lines round others—­for a dealer, I say, who dabbles in culture to exclaim indignantly, as one did to me not long ago, “I can’t think why you don’t like it:  it’s Post-Impressionist, isn’t it?”

If we cannot lose this habit of calling artists names, at least let us know exactly what we mean by them.  By associating artists with movements and counter-movements we encourage the superstition that in art there is some important distinction besides the distinction between good art and bad.  There is not.  Such distinctions as can be drawn between the genuine artists of one age and another, between traditional artists and eccentrics, though serviceable to historians and archaeologists, are pitfalls for critics and amateurs.  To him who can help us better to appreciate works of art let us be duly grateful:  to him who, from their extraneous qualities, can deduce amusing theories or pleasant fancies we will listen when we have time:  but to him who would persuade us that their value can in any way depend on some non-aesthetic quality we must be positively rude.  Now, if we are to get rid of those misleading labels from which works of art are supposed to derive a value over and above their aesthetic value, the first to go should be those arch-deceivers, “traditional” and “revolutionary.”  Let us understand that tradition is nothing but the essence, congealed and preserved for us by the masters in their works, of innumerable movements; and that movements are mere phases of the tradition from which