e bulk of our paid experts, who were much more pleased
by a particularly poor but very large Puvis, which possibly reminded
them in some obscure way of a pre-Raphaelite picture.[23] But when
there was question of selling a block of unimportant water-colours by
our national Turner and buying with the proceeds two or three great
masterpieces of Italian art the hubbub of these patriot-geese rose for a
moment above the noise of battle. Such is the atmosphere in which young
British artists are expected to mature.

One wonders what is going to happen to them--these young or youngish
Englishmen of talent. There are at least half a dozen on whom a
discerning critic would keep a hopeful eye--Mr. Duncan Grant, Mr. Lewis,
Mr. Stanley Spenser, Mr. Gertler, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Bomberg, Mrs. Bell,
and Mr. Epstein--for it would be absurd to omit from this list an artist
possessed of such skill, scholarship, and surprising powers of
improvisation and development as the last-named. Of these some already
have been touched by that breath of life which, blowing from Paris, has
revolutionized painting without much discomposing the placid shallows of
British culture. Standing in the broad light of European art, these can
hardly detect that sacred taper which the New English Art Club is said
to shield from the reactionary puffings of the Royal Academy. And,
although it is a dangerous thing in the suburbs to ignore nice points of
precedence and venerable feuds, such magnanimity makes for progress. Mr.
Grant, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Epstein, and Mrs. Bell, at any rate, are all cut
by Tooting, for they have seen the sun rise and warmed themselves in its
rays; it is particularly to be regretted, therefore, that Mr. Lewis
should have lent his great powers to the canalizing (for the old
metaphor was the better) of the new spirit in a little backwater called
English vorticism, which already gives signs of becoming as insipid as
any other puddle of provincialism. Can no one persuade him to be warned
by the fate of Mr. Eric Gill, who, some ten years ago, under the
influence presumably of Malliol, gave arresting expression to his very
genuine feelings, until, ridden by those twin hags insularity and wilful
ignorance, he drifted along the line of least resistance and, by an
earnest study of English ecclesiastical ornament, reduced his art to
something a little lower than English alabasters? The danger is there
always; and unless our able young men make a grand strug