they spring and in which they are swallowed up.  We shall then be armed, on the one hand, against the solemn bore who requires us to admire his imitation of an old master because it is in the tradition; on the other, against the portentous “Ist,” whose parthenogenetic masterpiece we are not in a state to relish till we have sucked down the pseudo-philosophic bolus that embodies his eponymous “Ism.”  To each we shall make the same reply:  “Be so good as to remove your irrelevant label and we will endeavour to judge your work on its merits.”

[Illustration:  PICASSO (Collection Paul Rosenberg)]

The names go together, as do those of Shelley and Keats or Fortnum and Mason.  Even to people who seldom or never look seriously at a picture they have stood, these ten years, as symbols of modernity.  They are pre-eminent; and for this there is reason.  Matisse and Picasso are the two immediate heirs to Cezanne.  They are in the direct line; and through one of them a great part of the younger generation comes at its share of the patrimony.  To their contemporaries they owe nothing:  they came into the legacy and had to make what they could of it.  They are the elder brothers of the movement, a fact which the movement occasionally resents by treating them as though they were its elder sisters.

Even to each other they owe nothing.  Matisse, to be sure, swept for one moment out of his course by the overwhelming significance of Picasso’s early abstract work, himself made a move in that direction.  But this adventure he quickly, and wisely, abandoned; the problems of Cubism could have helped him nothing to materialize his peculiar sensibility.  And this sensibility—­this peculiar emotional reaction to what he sees—­is his great gift.  No one ever felt for the visible universe just what Matisse feels; or, if one did, he could not create an equivalent.  Because, in addition to this magic power of creation, Matisse has been blest with extraordinary sensibility both of reaction and touch, he is a great artist; because he trusts to it entirely he is not what for a moment apparently he wished to be—­a chef d’ecole.

Picasso, on the other hand, who never tried to be anything of the sort, is the paramount influence in modern painting—­subject, of course, to the supreme influence of Cezanne.  All the world over are students and young painters to whom his mere name is thrilling; to whom Picasso is the liberator.  His influence is ubiquitous:  even in England it is immense.  Not only those who, for all their denials—­denials that spring rather from ignorance than bad faith—­owe almost all they have to the inventor of Cubism, but artists who float so far out of the main stream as the Spensers and the Nashes, Mr. Lamb and Mr. John, would all have painted differently had Picasso never existed.