Look at a picture by Cezanne or by Picasso.  What could be more orderly?  Cubism is nothing but the extreme manifestation of this passion for order, for the complete organization of forms and colours.  The artist has subordinated his predilections and prejudices, his peculiar way of seeing and feeling, his whims, his fancies and his eccentricities, to a dominant sense of design.  Yet the picture is personal.  In the first place a picture must be an organic whole, but that whole may be made up of anything that happens to possess the artist’s mind.  Now, look at a picture by Baudry or Poynter and you will see the last word in painting by precept.  The virtuous apprentice has stuck to the rules.  He has done all that his teacher bade him do.  And he has done nothing else.  David ought to be pleased.  Pray, M. Lhote, give him top marks.

Post-Impressionism, which reaffirmed the artist’s latent sense of order and reawoke a passion to create objects complete in themselves, left the painter in full possession of his individuality.  Now individualism is the breath of every artist’s life, and a thing of which no Frenchman, in his heart, can quite approve.  So, if an artist happens also to be a Frenchman—­and the combination is admirably common—­what is he to do?  Why, look one way and row the other; which is what M. Lhote does.  He paints delightfully personal and impenitent pictures, and preaches artistic Caesarism and David, “the saviour of society.”  All the week he is a French artist, traditional as all real artists must be, but never denying, when it comes to practice, that tradition is merely an indispensable means to self-expression; and on Sundays, I dare say, he goes, like Cezanne, to lean on M. le Cure, who leans on Rome, while his concierge receives the pure gospel of Syndicalism, which, also, is based on absolute truths, immutable, and above criticism.

It is notorious that you may with impunity call a placable Frenchman “butor,” “scelerat,” “coquin fieffe,” “sale chameau,” “depute” even, or “senateur”; but two things you may not do:  you may not call him “espece d’individu,” and you may not say “vous n’etes pas logique.”  It is as unpardonable to call a Frenchman “illogique” as to shout after the Venetian who has almost capsized your gondola “mal educato” M. Lhote is “logique” all right:  but “logical” in France has a peculiar meaning.  It means that you accept the consequences of your generalizations without bothering about any little discrepancies that may occur between those consequences and the facts ascertained by experience; it does not mean that your high a priori generalizations are themselves to be tested by the nasty, searching instrument of reason.  Thus it comes about that the second master to whom M. Lhote would put this wild and wilful age of ours to school is that mysterious trinity of painters which goes by the name of “Le Nain.”