And again: 

Pour n’avoir jamais asservi son art a la construction d’un systeme, pour avoir senti la vanite des theories, pour n’avoir pas fait tout les pelerinages d’ou l’on revient avec des regles, l’art d’Albert Marquet donne une impression de peinture heureuse.

Of course M. Besson is right.  Few in this world cut a more ludicrous figure than art-masters; few things are more deplorable than propaganda.  Yet M. Besson should be careful:  one thing there is more ridiculous still, and that is counter-propaganda.  Protestantism in art is the devil; but the devil is not such a fool as to protest against protestantism.  He leaves that to the young bloods of the Rotonde and the Cafe Royal.  By all means let M. Besson claim liberty for his artist, but, in doing so, let him beware of denying it to another, even though what that other demands be “liberty of prophesying” or the right to preach the gospel according to David.

STANDARDS

Some people in England are beginning to realize that while we have been “saving civilization,” first from Germans, and then from Bolsheviks, we have come near losing it ourselves. [Q] This disquieting truth has been borne in on them by various signs and portents, not least by the utter collapse of taste.  At life’s feast we are like people with colds in their heads:  we have lost all power of discrimination.  As ever, “Dido, Queen of Carthage,” and better things than that, are caviare to the general:  what is new, and worse, to our most delicate epicures bloater paste is now caviare.

[Footnote Q:  Written in March 1919.]

At a London dinner-party even a peeress, even an American lady who has married a peer, dare not commit herself to an adverse literary judgement—­except in the case of notoriously disaffected writers—­for the very good reason that she does not know where to go for a literary judgement that shall be above reproach.  We have as little confidence in our critics as in our ministers.  Indeed, since all our officers, and most of our privates, took to publishing pages of verse or, at any rate, of prose that looks odd enough to be verse, the habit of criticism has been voted unpatriotic.  To grudge a man in the trenches a column of praise loud enough to drown for a moment the noise of battle would have seemed ungrateful and, what is worse, fastidious.  Our critics were neither; they did their bit:  and no one was surprised to hear the stuff with which schoolboys line their lockers described as “one of the truest, deepest, and most moving notes that have been struck since the days of Elizabeth.”