Yet with all this colour the “feel” of the land was silvery-grey. The thorn-bushes and the rare trees were bent at an angle under the pressure of the South-West gales. The inland hamlets and farms huddled down in the hollows behind a protecting wall of elms. They were humble, unpretentious but authentic, like the lives of the shepherds and ploughmen who lived in them. The three to ten miles which separated them from the pretentious suburbanity of Martin’s Point might have been three hundred, so unmoved, so untouched were they by its golf and its idleness and tea-party scandals and even its increasing number of “cars.” In hollows, too, crouched its low, flint-built Norman churches, so unpretentious, for all the richness of dog-toothed porches and Byzantine-looking tympanums and conventionalized satiric heads sneering and gaping and grimacing from the string-courses. Hard satiric people those Norman conquerors must have been—you can see the hard satiric effigies of some of their descendants in the Temple Churche. They must have crushed the Saxon shepherds and swineherds under their steel gauntlets, smiling in a hard satiric way. And even their piety was hard and satiric, if you can judge from the little flinty satiric churches they scattered over the land. Then they must have pushed on westward to richer lands, abandoning those barren downs and scanty fields to the descendants of the oppressed Saxon. So the land seemed old; but the hard satiric quality of the Normans only remained in odd nooks of their churches—all the rest had grown gentle and silvery-grey, like a rather sweet and gentle silvery-grey old lady. * * * * * All this George struggled to express with his drawing-and-paint-blocks. He tried to absorb—and to some extent did absorb—the peculiar quality of the country. He attempted it all, from the twenty-mile sweeps of undulating Down fringed by the grey-silver sea, to the church doors and little patient photographic, semi-scientific painting of the flowers and butterflies. From the point of view of a painter, he was always too literal, too topographical, too minutely interested in detail. He saw the poetry of the land but didn’t express it in form and colour. The old English landscape school of 1770-1840 died long before Turner’s body reached St. Paul’s and his money went into the pockets of the greedy English lawyers instead of to the painters for whom he intended it. The impulse expired in painstaking topography and sentimental prettiness. There wasn’t the vitality, the capacity to struggle on, which you find in the best work of painters like Friesz, Vlaminck and even Utrillo, who can find a new sort of poetry in tossing trees or a white farmhouse or a _bistro_ in the Paris suburbs. George, even at fifteen, knew what he wanted to say in paint, but couldn’t say it. He could appreciate it in others, but he hadn’t got the power of expression in him.