This is plain speaking; how else should a critic, who believes that he has diagnosed the disease, convince a modern patient of his parlous state?  To just hint a fault and hesitate dislike (not Pope, but I split that infinitive) is regarded nowadays merely as a sign of a base, compromising spirit; or not regarded at all.  Artists, especially in England, cannot away with qualified praise or blame:  and if they insist on all or nothing I can but offer them the latter.  Nevertheless, I must assert, for my own satisfaction, that in many even of our most imperial artists, in the brothers Spenser and the brothers Nash, in Mr. Lewis, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Bomberg, and Mr. Lamb, I discover plenty of ability; only I cannot help fancying that they may have mistaken the nature of their gifts.  Were they really born to be painters?  I wonder.  But of this I am sure:  their friends merely make them look silly by comparing them with contemporary French masters, or even with Lionardo da Vinci.

Wilcoxism is a terrible disease because it slowly but surely eats away our sense of imperfection, our desire for improvement, and our power of self-criticism.  Modesty and knowledge are the best antidotes; and a treatment much recommended by the faculty is to take more interest in art and less in one’s own prestige.  Above all, let us cultivate a sense of proportion.  Let us admire, for instance, the admirable, though somewhat negative, qualities in the work of Mr. Lewis—­the absence of vulgarity and false sentiment, the sobriety of colour, the painstaking search for design—­without forgetting that in the Salon d’Automne or the Salon des Independants a picture by him would neither merit nor obtain from the most generous critic more than a passing word of perfunctory encouragement; for in Paris there are perhaps five hundred men and women—­drawn from the four quarters of the earth—­all trying to do what Mr. Lewis tries to do, and doing it better.

ART AND POLITICS

Mr. Roger Fry, by means of an instructive tale (Athenaeum, August 13, 1920), has shown us that in their dealings with art Bolshevik politicians remain true to type.  Like the rest of their breed, they have no use for it unless they can exploit it to their own ends.  For my part, I was never so simple as to suppose that, if the de facto government of Russia professed admiration for Matisse and Picasso, that admiration had anything to do with the artistic gifts of either of these painters, any more than that the respect with which the British Government treats the names of Raphael and Michel Angelo should be taken to imply that any single one of His Majesty’s ministers has ever experienced an aesthetic emotion.  Consequently, I was not at all surprised to learn that the sure, though unconscious, taste of the statesman had led the rulers of Russia to reject their first loves; that instinctively they had divined that both Matisse and Picasso were too much like genuine artists to be trustworthy; and that they had, therefore, transferred their affections to the thin, and fundamentally academic, work of Larionoff, which should, I fancy, be just the thing for advanced politicians.