Who am I that I should take exception to the guffaw?  Ten years ago I too guffawed, though I hope with not quite the Kensingtonian twang.  The first Cezannes I ever saw seemed to me to be very funny.  They did not disturb my dreams, because I was not in the business.  But my notion about Cezanne was that he was a fond old man who distracted himself by daubing.  I could not say how my conversion to Cezanne began.  When one is not a practising expert in an art, a single word, a single intonation, uttered by an expert whom one esteems, may commence a process of change which afterwards seems to go on by itself.  But I remember being very much impressed by a still-life—­some fruit in a bowl—­and on approaching it I saw Cezanne’s clumsy signature in the corner.  From that moment the revelation was swift.  And before I had seen any Gauguins at all, I was prepared to consider Gauguin with sympathy.  The others followed naturally.  I now surround myself with large photographs of these pictures of which a dozen years ago I was certainly quite incapable of perceiving the beauty.  The best still-life studies of Cezanne seem to me to have the grandiose quality of epics.  And that picture by Gauguin, showing the back of a Tahitian young man with a Tahitian girl on either side of him, is an affair which I regard with acute pleasure every morning.  There are compositions by Vuillard which equally enchant me.  Naturally I cannot accept the whole school—­no more than the whole of any school.  I have derived very little pleasure from Matisse, and the later developments of Felix Vallotton leave me in the main unmoved.  But one of the very latest phenomena of the school—­the water-colours of Pierre Laprade—­I have found ravishing.

* * * * *

It is in talking to several of these painters, in watching their familiar deportment, and particularly in listening to their conversations with others on subjects other than painting, that I have come to connect their ideas with literature.  They are not good theorizers about art; and I am not myself a good theorizer about art; a creative artist rarely is.  But they do ultimately put their ideas into words.  You may receive one word one day and the next next week, but in the end an idea gets itself somehow stated.  Whenever I have listened to Laprade criticizing pictures, especially students’ work, I have thought about literature; I have been forced to wonder whether I should not have to reconsider my ideals.  The fact is that some of these men are persuasive in themselves.  They disengage, in their talk, in their profound seriousness, in their sense of humour, in the sound organization of their industry, and in their calm assurance—­they disengage a convincingness that is powerful beyond debate.  An artist who is truly original cannot comment on boot-laces without illustrating his philosophy and consolidating his position.  Noting in myself that a regular contemplation of these pictures inspires