Cézanne and Seurat and the elaborations of their immediate descendants
will be modified and revitalized by the pressure and spirit of the great
tradition. The leader has already been chosen. Derain is the chief
of the new French school--a school destined manifestly to be less
cosmopolitan than its predecessor. The tendency towards nationalism
everywhere is unmistakeable--a consequence of the war, I suppose. It is
useless to deplore the fact or exult in it: one can but accept it as one
accepts the weather. Even England has not escaped; and it is to be noted
that our best painter, Duncan Grant, a descendant of Cézanne who has run
the whole gamut of abstract experiment, is settling down, without of
course for a moment denying his master, to exploit the French heritage,
with feet planted firmly in the English tradition--the tradition of
Gainsborough and Constable. In France, where tradition is so much
richer, its weight will confine more closely and drive more intensely
the new spirit. One new tendency--that which insists more passionately
than ever on order and organization--merely continues the impetus given
by Cézanne and received by all his followers; but another, more vague,
towards something which I had rather call humanism than humanity, does
imply, I think, a definite breach with Cubism and the tenets of the
austerer doctrinaires. It is not drama or anecdote or sentiment or
symbolism that this would bring back to the plastic arts, but rather
that mysterious yet recognizable quality in which the art of Raffael
excels--a calm, disinterested, and professional concern with the
significance of life as revealed directly in form, a faint desire,
perhaps, to touch by a picture, a building, or a simple object of use
some curious over-tone of our aesthetic sense. Deep in their quest of
that borderland beauty which is common to life and art French painters
are once again deeply concerned with life: to borrow an idea from my
next essay, they have chosen a new artistic problem. To them,
however, "life" does not mean what it means to the sentimentalists or