I can quite understand M. Lhote’s liking for the brothers Le Nain, because I share it.  Their simple, honest vision and frank statement are peculiarly sympathetic to the generation that swears by Cezanne.  Here are men of good faith who feel things directly, and say not a word more than they feel.  With a little ingenuity and disingenuousness one might make a douanier of them.  They are scrupulous, sincere, and born painters.  But they are not orderly.  They are not organizers of form and colour.  No:  they are not.  On the contrary, these good fellows had the most elementary notions of composition.  They seem hardly to have guessed that what one sees is but a transitory and incoherent fragment out of which it is the business of art to draw permanence and unity.  They set down what they saw, and it is a bit of good luck if what they saw turns out to have somewhat the air of a whole.  Yet M. Lhote, preaching his crusade against disorder, picks out the Le Nain and sets them up as an example.  What is the meaning of this?

M. Lhote himself supplies the answer.  It is not order so much as authority that he is after; and authority is good wherever found and by whomsoever exercised.  “Look,” says he, “at Le Nain’s peasants.  The painter represents them to us in the most ordinary attitude.  It is the poetry of everyday duties accepted without revolt.  Le Nain’s personages are engaged in being independent as little as possible.”  No Bolshevism here:  and what a lesson for us all!  Let painters submit themselves lowly and reverently to David, and seventeenth-century peasants to their feudal superiors.  Not that I have the least reason for supposing M. Lhote to be in politics an aristocrat:  probably he is a better democrat than I am.  It is the [Greek:  kratos], the rule, he cares for.  Do as you are told by Louis XIV, or Lenin, or David:  only be sure that it is as you are told.  M. Lhote, of course, does nothing of the sort.  He respects the tradition, he takes tips from Watteau or Ingres or Cezanne, but orders he takes from no man.  He is an artist, you see.

In many ways this respect for authority has served French art well.  It is the source of that traditionalism, that tradition of high seriousness, craftsmanship, and good taste, which, even in the darkest days of early Victorianism, saved French painting from falling into the pit of stale vulgarity out of which English has hardly yet crawled.  French revolutions in painting are fruitful, English barren—­let the Pre-Raphaelite movement be my witness.  The harvest sown by Turner and Constable was garnered abroad.  Revolutions depart from tradition.  Yes, but they depart as a tree departs from the earth.  They grow out of it; and in England there is no soil.  On the other hand, it is French conventionality—­for that is what this taste for discipline comes to—­which holds down French painting, as a whole, below Italian.  There are journeys a Frenchman dare not take because,