The sensibility of English artists, whether verbal or visual, is as notorious as their sense of beauty.  This becomes less surprising when we reflect that the former includes the latter.  The fact is, critics, with their habitual slovenliness, apply the term “sensibility” to two different things.  Sometimes they are talking about the artist’s imagination, and sometimes about his use of the instrument:  sometimes about his reactions, and sometimes—­in the case of painters—­about the tips of his fingers.  It is true that both qualities owe their existence to and are conditioned by one fundamental gift—­a peculiar poise—­a state of feeling—­which may well be described as “sensibility.”  But, though both are consequences of this peculiar delicacy and what I should like to call “light-triggeredness” of temperament, they are by no means identical.  By “sensibility” critics may mean an artist’s power of responding easily and intensely to the aesthetic significance of what he sees; this power they might call, if they cared to be precise, “sensibility of inspiration.”  At other times they imply no more than sensibility of touch:  in which case they mean that the contact between the artist’s brush and his canvas has the quality of a thrilling caress, so that it seems almost as if the instrument that bridged the gulf between his fingers and the surface of his picture must have been as much alive as himself.  “Sensibility of handling” or “hand-writing” is the proper name for this.  In a word, there is sensibility of the imagination and sensibility of the senses:  one is receptive, the other executive.  Now, Duncan Grant’s reactions before the visible universe are exquisitely vivid and personal, and the quality of his paint is often as charming as a kiss.  He is an artist who possesses both kinds of sensibility.  These are adorable gifts; but they are not extraordinarily rare amongst English painters of the better sort.

In my judgement Gainsborough and Duncan Grant are the English painters who have been most splendidly endowed with sensibility of both sorts, but I could name a dozen who have been handsomely supplied.  In my own time there have been four—­Burne-Jones (you should look at his early work), Conder, Steer, and John, all of whom had an allowance far above the average, while in America there was Whistler.  No one, I suppose, would claim for any of these, save, perhaps, Whistler, a place even in the second rank of artists.  From which it follows clearly that something more than delicacy of reaction and touch is needed to make a man first-rate.  What is needed is, of course, constructive power.  An artist must be able to convert his inspiration into significant form; for in art it is not from a word to a blow, but from a tremulous, excited vision to an orderly mental conception, and from that conception, by means of the problem and with the help of technique, to externalization in form.  That is where intelligence and creative power come in.  And no British painter has, as yet, combined with sure and abundant sensibility power and intelligence of a sort to do perfectly, and without fail, this desperate and exacting work.  In other words, there has been no British painter of the first magnitude.  But I mistake, or Gainsborough, Crome, Constable, and Duncan Grant were all born with the possibility of greatness in them.