majority. I had thoughts once of printing a selection from the
press-cuttings that reached us at the Grafton Galleries during the
first Post-Impressionist exhibition. It would have revealed our leading
critics and experts, our professors and directors, our connoisseurs, our
more cultivated dealers and our most popular painters vying with each
other in heaping abuse and ridicule on the heads of Cézanne, Gauguin,
and Van Gogh. The project is abandoned. That sort of thing I perceive
becomes a bore. And I only wish M. Vollard had perceived it when he was
writing about Zola. Zola failed to appreciate Cézanne, of course. Zola
was an ordinary middle-class man: he was vain, vulgar, petty; he
longed for the consideration of people like himself, and was therefore
ostentatious; he had a passion for money and notoriety; he wanted to be
thought not only clever but good; he preached, he deprecated, he took a
moral standpoint and judged by results; and his taste was execrable. We
meet people of Zola's sort every day in third-class railway carriages
and first, on the tops of omnibuses and in Chelsea drawing-rooms, at
the music-hall, at the opera, at classical concerts, and in Bond Street
galleries. We take them for granted and are perfectly civil to them. So
why, because he happened to have an astonishing gift of statement
and rapid generalization, should Zola be treated as though he were a
monster? Though Diggle, the billiards champion, care little or nothing
for poetry, he may have an excellent heart, as well as a hand far
surpassing in dexterity that of our most accomplished portrait-painters.
No one dreams of reviling him.

Let us be equally just to Zola; let us notice, too, how amusingly he
sets off Cézanne. Both were greatly gifted men: neither was the man
of intelligence and talent, the brilliant man with the discursive
intellect, who carries his gift about with him, takes it out when and
where he pleases, and applies it where and how he likes. Zola, when he