And if Picasso is anything but a dry doctrinaire, Matisse is no singing bird with one little jet of spontaneous melody.  I wish his sculpture were better known in England, for it disposes finely of the ridiculous notion that Matisse is a temperament without a head.  Amongst his bronze and plaster figures you will find sometimes a series consisting of several versions of the same subject, in which the original superabundant conception has been reduced to bare essentials by a process which implies the severest intellectual effort.  Nothing that Matisse has done gives a stronger sense of his genius, and, at the same time, makes one so sharply aware of a brilliant intelligence and of erudition even.

Amongst the hundred differences between Matisse and Picasso perhaps, after all, there is but one on which a critic can usefully insist.  Even about that he can say little that is definite.  Only, it does appear to be true that whereas Matisse is a pure artist, Picasso is an artist and something more—­an involuntary preacher if you like.  Neither, of course, falls into the habit of puffing out his pictures with literary stuff, though Picasso has, on occasions, allowed to filter into his art a, to me, most distasteful dash of sentimentality.  That is not the point, however.  The point is that whereas both create without commenting on life, Picasso, by some inexplicable quality in his statement, does unmistakably comment on art.  That is why he, and not Matisse, is master of the modern movement.

THE PLACE OF ART IN ART CRITICISM

The knowing ones—­those, I mean, who are always invited to music after tea, and often to supper after the ballet—­seem now to agree that in art significant form is the thing.  You are not to suppose that, in saying this, I am trying to make out that all these distinguished, or soon to be distinguished, people have been reading my book.  On the contrary, I have the solidest grounds for believing that very few of them have done that; and those that have treat me no better than they treated Hegel.  For, just as an Hegelian is not so much a follower of that philosopher as an expounder, one who has an interpretation of his own, and can tell you what Hegel would have said if Hegel had been endowed by The Absolute with the power of saying anything, so of those admirable people who agree, for the moment, that significant form is what matters, no two are quite agreed as to what significant form is.

Only as to what it is not is there complete unanimity; though there is a tendency to come together on one or two positive points.  It is years since I met anyone, careful of his reputation, so bold as to deny that the literary and anecdotic content of a work of visual art, however charming and lively it might be, was mere surplusage.  The significance of a picture, according to the cognoscenti, must be implicit in its forms; its essential quality is