a provincial and utterly insignificant contrivance which has borrowed what it could from Cubism and Futurism and added nothing to either.  They like to fancy that the English tradition is that of Gainsborough and Constable, quite failing to realize what havoc has been made of this admirable plastic tradition by that puerile gospel of literary pretentiousness called Pre-Raphaelism.  Towards these mournful quags and quicksands, with their dead-sea flora of anecdote and allegory, the best part of the little talent we produce seems irresistibly to be drawn:  by these at last it is sucked down.  That, at any rate, is the way that most of those English artists who ten or a dozen years ago gave such good promise have gone.  Let us hope better of the new generation—­recent exhibitions afford some excuse—­a generation which, if reactionarily inclined, can always take Steer for a model, or, if disposed to keep abreast of the times and share in the heritage of Cezanne as well as that of Constable, can draw courage from the fact that there is, after all, one English painter—­Duncan Grant—­who takes honourable rank beside the best of his contemporaries.

[Footnote C:  The Irish painter O’Conor, and the Canadian Morrice, are both known and respected in Paris; but because they have lived their lives there and known none but French influences they are rarely thought of as British.  In a less degree the same might be said of that admirable painter George Barne.]

It is fifteen years since Cezanne died, and only now is it becoming possible to criticize him.  That shows how overwhelming his influence was.  The fact that at last his admirers and disciples, no longer under any spell or distorting sense of loyalty, recognize that there are in painting plenty of things worth doing which he never did is all to the good.  It is now possible to criticize him seriously; and when all his insufficiencies have been fairly shown he remains one of the very greatest painters that ever lived.  The serious criticism of Cezanne is a landmark in the history of the movement, and still something of a novelty; for, naturally, I reckon the vulgar vituperation with which his work was greeted, and the faint praise with which it was subsequently damned, as no criticism at all.  The hacks and pedagogues and middle-class metaphysicians who abused him, and only when it dawned on them that they were making themselves silly, in the eyes of their own flock even, took to patronizing, are forgot.  They babble in the Burlington Fine Arts Club—­where nobody marks them—­and have their reward in professorships and the direction of public galleries.  The criticism that matters, of which we are beginning to hear something, comes mostly from painters, his ardent admirers, who realize that Cezanne attempted things which he failed to achieve and deliberately shunned others worth achieving.  Also, they realize that there is always a danger of one good custom corrupting the world.