Some time ago, however, before Picasso was found out, a young Russian aesthete—­so Mr. Fry tells us—­was licensed by the competent authority to pronounce that artist’s eulogy, on the understanding, of course, that the lecture should somehow serve as a stick wherewith to beat the opposition.  Nothing easier:  Picasso was pitted against Renoir.  Picasso was a great artist, because, abstract and austere, he was the man for the proletariat; whereas Renoir, who painted pretty pictures for the bourgeoisie, was no earthly good.  The lecturer, as might have been expected, was out even in his facts:  for Renoir—­who came from the people, by the way—­might, were he less of an artist, by means of the taking and almost anecdotic quality of his earlier work, give some pleasure to a working man; whereas Picasso—­the son of middle-class parents, too—­could not possibly win from an honest labourer, left to himself, anything but sarcastic laughter or ferocious abuse.  But even if true, the lecturer’s facts would have been beside the point.  To say that a work is aristocratic or democratic, moral or immoral, is to say something silly and irrelevant, or rather, silly if meant to be relevant to its value as art.  In the work of Renoir and of Picasso, in all works of art for that matter, the essential quality, as every sensitive person knows, is the same.  Whatever it may be that makes art matter is to be found in every work that does matter.  And though, no doubt, “subject” and to some extent “attack” may be conditioned by an artist’s opinions and attitude to life, such things are irrelevant to his work’s final significance.  Strange as it may seem, the essential quality in a work of art is purely artistic.  It has nothing to do with the moral, religious, or political views of its creator.  It has to do solely with his aesthetic experience and his power of expressing that.  But, as no politician is capable of appreciating, or even becoming aware of, this essential quality, it is perhaps only natural that politicians should look elsewhere for the significance of art.

This painful but certain fact once grasped, it becomes possible to understand several things that have considerably puzzled critics and historians.  For instance, it is often remarked, and generally with surprise, that progressive politicians are commonly averse to new movements in art.  The attitude of the present Russian Government to the contemporary movement makes neither for nor against this view, for that novelty it took over as a going concern.  Let us see how it looks on the next, which will be very likely a return to the tradition of Ingres.  The example usually cited by exponents of this theory—­that progressive politicians are reactionary in art—­is the notorious hostility of Liberals to the romantic movement; but I believe that were they to study closely the histories of the Impressionist, the Pre-Raphaelite, and the Wagnerian movements they would find in them, too, evidence on the whole favourable to their case.