though it is to be remembered that it kept its critical faculty sufficiently sharp to reject the Futurists while welcoming the Cubists.  I cannot deny, however, that in that moment of enthusiasm and loyalty we were rather disposed to find extraordinary merits in commonplace painters.  We knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of Cezanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of anyone else—­but, then, was our particular postulant so feeble after all?  Also, we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of Cezanne had made it possible for a mediocre artist to express a little store of recondite virtue which under another dispensation must have lain hid for ever.  I doubt we exaggerated.  We were much too kind, I fancy, to a number of perfectly commonplace young people, and said a number of foolish things about them.  What was worse, we were unjust to the past.  That was inevitable.  The intemperate ferocity of the opposition drove us into Protestantism, and Protestantism is unjust always.  It made us narrow, unwilling to give credit to outsiders of merit, and grossly indulgent to insiders of little or none.  Certainly we appreciated the Orientals, the Primitives, and savage art as they had never been appreciated before; but we underrated the art of the Renaissance and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Also, because we set great store by our theories and sought their implications everywhere, we claimed kinship with a literary movement with which, in fact, we had nothing in common.  Charles-Louis Philippe and the Unanimistes should never have been compared with the descendants of Cezanne.  Happily, when it came to dragging in Tolstoyism, and Dostoievskyism even, and making of the movement something moral and political almost, the connection was seen to be ridiculous and was duly cut.

The protagonists of the heroic epoch (1904—­1914 shall we say?) were Matisse and Picasso.  In modern European painting Picasso remains the paramount influence; of modern French, however, Derain is the chief; while Matisse, who may still be the best painter alive, has hardly any influence at all.  In these early days Derain, considerably younger than Matisse and less precocious than Picasso, was less conspicuous than either; yet he always held a peculiar and eminent position, with an intellect apt for theoretical conundrums and sensibility to match that of any Fauve and his personal genius brooding over both.  About the best known of Matisse’s companions—­for they were in no sense his disciples—­were, I should say, Friesz, Vlaminck, Laprade, Chabaud, Marquet, Manguin, Puy, Delaunay, Rouault, Girieud, Flandrin.  I think I am justified in describing all these, with the exception, perhaps, of Girieud and Flandrin, as Fauves; assuredly I have heard them all so described.  In very early days Maurice Denis was by some reckoned a chief, the equal almost of Matisse; but through sloppy sentiment he fell into mere futility, and by