only been used for the boosting of public men and patent medicines. The terribly refined will vote him vulgar: to be a vulgarisateur is his pride.
He is usually wise, and always epigrammatic. Behind his most outrageous dogmatism, you can detect the modesty of the worldling; Mr Bell is no fanatic. If he 1s autocratic, it is to goad you into standing on your own legs. And he is the best of company for that class who, as he well points out, need to be infected with enthusiasm, and to have their sensibility occasionally given a serviceable jog. It is a class to which most of us belong. His gusto succeeds in being contagious, because you feel that he enjoys a picture as naturally as if it were a bottle of Château-Yquem or the good looks of a witty woman.
I consider his taste in paintings excellent; Crome, David, Whistler, Modigliani, and Derain are put into their proper places, and given the appropriate number of marks with an assurance at which I gasp, while I confess its approximate justice. But the lists of names with which he baits the ignorant in his first paper are too reminiscent of Baedeker, and my extreme admiration for the work of that delicate and various artist, Duncan Grant, cannot be increased by the tireless praises of him which keep bobbing up. Surely the one paper devoted to him had been enough. As it is, I have the incongruous vision of a maquerelle importuning me with commendations of her latest primeur. And, as a lover, I naturally resent it.
But after all it is impossible to say more than a little that is profitable about particular painters: the Paterian or impressionistic school of critics is as dead as—as Ruskin, and a criticism based on the new psychology has hardly yet appeared. So that Mr Bell is at his best when he is discussing more general topics, such as the functions of criticism and the love of authority ingrained in the French character. It was he who invented that graceless but useful phrase "significant form," and this time he has enriched our critical vocabulary with a new term, "Wilcoxism." There is much in Since Cézanne to interest those who know little of painting, and find aesthetic a bore.
Perhaps it is a bore; though its influence on modern painting has been prodigious. Anyhow it is impracticable in a review to discuss it. I can do no more than throw out a few heretical suggestions. On the one hand, we have the purism of Mr Bell, on the other, those
