To return from Paris, full of enthusiasm for contemporary art, and find
oneself forced immediately into an attitude of querulous hostility is
surely a melancholy thing. It is my fate; but it is not my fault. Had I
found our native quidnuncs in a slightly less exalted humour, had they
gushed a little less over their imperial painters at Burlington House,
had they made the least effort to preserve a sense of proportion, I,
for my part, had held my peace. But, deafened by the chorus of hearty
self-applause with which British art has just been regaling itself, [W] a
critic who hopes that his country is not once again going to make itself
the laughing-stock of Europe is bound at all risks to say something
disagreeable.
[Footnote W: February 1920.]
In that delightful book _The Worlds and I_, for bringing me acquainted
with which I shall ever be grateful to _The Athenæum_, nothing is more
delightful than the chapter in which Mrs. Wilcox takes us through the
list of the great writers she has known. We are almost as much pleased
by the authoress's confident expectation that we shall be thrilled
to learn any new fact about Miss Aldrich, who wrote "one of the most
exquisite lyrics in the language"; about Rhoda Hero Dunn, "a genius"
with "an almost Shakespearean quality in her verse," or about Elsa
Barker, whose poem _The Frozen Grail_, "dedicated to Peary and his band,
is an epic of august beauty," and whose sonnet _When I am Dead_ "ranks
with the great sonnets of the world," as she would be surprised to
discover that we had never heard of one of them. Mrs. Wilcox believed,
in perfect good faith, that the crowd of magazine-makers with whom she
associated were, in fact, the great figures of the age. She had no
reason for supposing that we should not be as much interested in
first-hand personal gossip about Zona Gale and Ridgeley Torrence, Arthur
Grissom (first editor of the _Smart Set_), Judge Malone, Theodosia
Garrison, and Julie Opp Faversham ("even to talk with whom over the
telephone gives me a sense of larger horizons") as we should have been
in similar gossip about Swinburne and Hardy, Henry James and Mallarmé,
Laforgue, Anatole France, Tolstoy, Tchekov, or Dostoevsky.
And, as Mrs. Wilcox had no reason for supposing that her friends were
not the greatest writers alive, what reason had she for supposing that
they were not the greatest that ever lived? Without the taste, the
intelligence, or the knowledge which alone can give some notion of
what's what in art, she was obliged to rely on more accessible criteria.
The circulation of her own works, for instance, must have compared
favourably with that of most poets. To be sure there was Shakespeare and
the celebrated Hugo--or was it Gambetta? But what grounds could there be
for thinking that she was not superior to the obscure John Donne or the
obscurer Andrew Marvel, or to Arthur Rimbaud, of whom no one she had
ever heard of had ever heard? Mrs. Wilcox was not dishonest in assuming
that the most successful writer in her set was the best in the world;
she was not conceited even; she was merely ridiculous.
It is disquieting to find the same sort of thing going on in England,
where our painters are fiercely disputing with each other the crown of
European painting, and our critics appraising the respective claims
of Mr. Augustus John and Mr. John Nash as solemnly as if they were
comparing Cézanne with Renoir. It is more than disquieting, it is
alarming, to detect symptoms of the disease--this distressing disease
of Wilcoxism--in _The Athenæum_ itself. Yet I am positive that not long
since I read in this very paper that Mr. Wyndham Lewis was more than a
match for Matisse and Derain; and, having said so much, the critic not
unnaturally went on to suggest that he was a match for Lionardo da
Vinci. Since then I have trembled weekly lest the infection should have
spread to our literary parts. Will it be asserted, one of these Fridays,
that the appetizing novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan are distinctly better
than Hardy's Wessex tales, and comparable rather with the works of Jane
Austen?
To save ourselves from absurdity, and still more to save our painters
from inspissating that trickle of fatuity which wells from heads swollen
with hot air, critics should set themselves to check this nasty malady.
Let them make it clear that to talk of modern English painting as though
it were the rival of modern French is silly. In old racing days--how
matters stand now I know not--it used to be held that French form was
about seven pounds below English: the winner of the Derby, that is to
say, could generally give the best French colt about that weight and a
beating. In painting, English form is normally a stone below French. At
any given moment the best painter in England is unlikely to be better
than a first-rate man in the French second class. Whistler was never a
match for Renoir, Degas, Seurat, and Manet; but Whistler, Steer, and
Sickert may profitably be compared with Boudin, Jongkind, and Berthe
Morisot. And though Duncan Grant holds his own handsomely with Marchand,
Vlaminck, Lhote, de Segonzac, Bracque and Modigliani, I am not yet
prepared to class him with Matisse, Picasso, Derain, and Bonnard.
Having bravely recognized this disagreeable truth, let us take as much
interest in contemporary British painting as we can. I will try to
believe that it merits more enthusiasm than I have been able to show,
provided it is not made a point of patriotism to excite oneself about
the Imperial War Museum's pictures exhibited at Burlington House. As
a matter of fact, the most depressing thing about that show was the
absence of the very quality for which British art has been most justly
admired--I mean sensibility. Mr. Wilson Steer's picture seemed to me the
best in the place, just because Mr. Steer has eyes with which, not only
to see, but to feel. To see is something; Mr. Steer also feels for what
he sees; and this emotion is the point of departure for his pictures.
That he seems almost completely to have lost such power as he ever
had of giving to his vision a coherent and self-supporting form is
unfortunate; still, he does convey to us some modicum of the thrill
provoked in him by his vision of Dover Harbour.
Those thoughtful young men, on the other hand, whose works have been
causing such a commotion might almost as well have been blind. They seem
to have seen nothing; at any rate, they have not reacted to what they
saw in that particular way in which visual artists react. They are not
expressing what they feel for something that has moved them as artists,
but, rather, what they think about something that has horrified them
as men. Their pictures depart, not from a visual sensation, but from a
moral conviction. So, naturally enough, what they produce is mere "arty"
anecdote. This, perhaps, is the secret of their success--their success,
I mean, with the cultivated public. Those terrible young fellows
who were feared to be artists turn out after all to be innocent
Pre-Raphaelites. They leave Burlington House without a stain upon their
characters.
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 Indépendants 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.