a picture.  In the former class you will find men who may be great figures, but can never be more than mediocre artists:  Duncan Grant is of the latter.  He is in the English tradition without being in the English rut.  He has sensibility of inspiration, beauty of touch, and poetry; but, controlling these, he has intelligence and artistic integrity.  He is extremely English; but he is more of an artist than an Englishman.

Already the Chelsea show of African and Oceanian sculpture is sending the cultivated public to the ethnographical collections in the British Museum, just as, last autumn, the show organized in Paris by M. Paul Guillaume filled the Trocadero. [O] Fine ladies, young painters, and exquisite amateurs are now to be seen in those long dreary rooms that once were abandoned to missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial soldiers, enhancing their prestige by pointing out to stay-at-home cousins the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy.  For my part I like the change.  I congratulate the galleries and admire the visitors, though the young painters, I cannot help thinking, have been a little slow.

[Footnote O:  1919]

Negro art was discovered—­its real merit was first recognized, I mean—­some fifteen years ago, in Paris, by the painters there.  Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and Vlaminck began picking up such pieces as they could find in old curiosity and pawn shops; with Guillaume Apollinaire, literary apostle, following apostolically at their heels.  Thus a demand was created which M. Paul Guillaume was there to meet and stimulate.  But, indeed, the part played by that enterprising dealer is highly commendable; for the Trocadero collections being, unlike the British, mediocre both in quantity and quality, it was he who put the most sensitive public in Europe—­a little cosmopolitan group of artists, critics, and amateurs—­in the way of seeing a number of first-rate things.

Because, in the past, Negro art has been treated with absurd contempt, we are all inclined now to overpraise it; and because I mean to keep my head I shall doubtless by my best friends be called a fool.  Judging from the available data—­no great stock, by the way—­I should say that Negro art was entitled to a place amongst the great schools, but that it was no match for the greatest.  With the greatest I would compare it.  I would compare it with the art of the supreme Chinese periods (from Han to Sung), with archaic Greek, with Byzantine, with Mahomedan, which, for archaeological purposes, begins under the Sassanians a hundred years and more before the birth of the prophet; I would compare it with Romanesque and early Italian (from Giotto to Raffael); but I would place it below all these.  On the other hand, when I consider the whole corpus of black art known to us, and compare it with Assyrian, Roman, Indian, true Gothic (not Romanesque, that is to say), or late Renaissance it seems to me that the blacks have the best of it.  And, on the whole, I should be inclined to place West and Central African art, at any rate, on a level with Egyptian.  Such sweeping classifications, however, are not to be taken too seriously.  All I want to say is that, though the capital achievements of the greatest schools do seem to me to have an absolute superiority over anything Negro I have seen, yet the finest black sculpture is so rich in artistic qualities that it is entitled to a place beside them.