Of the remaining British artists, the most interesting, to my mind, is Vanessa Bell. The influence of Duncan Grant on her work is unmistakable, and I hope, unlike most artists, who seem to suppose that for them the laws of cause and effect and the influence of environment are inoperative, she will not mind my saying so. Why, in artists so original as Giotto, El Greco, and Cezanne, at least 50 per cent is derivative! Vanessa Bell, like all artists, and especially women artists, is impressionable, but as the effect on her work of familiarity with one or two English painters and the modern French masters is altogether for the good, I see no harm in that. At the same time, she has very personal gifts. Besides a large simplicity of style, there is about her drawing something oddly sympathetic, and what I should call, for want of a better word, amusing; while a sense of the peculiar significance to her of certain forms and relations of forms comes through and gives to her work an air of intimacy that you will get from nothing else in this exhibition. Any woman who can make her work count in the art of her age deserves to be criticized very seriously. In literature the authoress stands firm on her own feet; only quite uneducated people--subaltern-poets and young Latin philosophers--believe that women cannot write; but it is a mere truism to say that no woman-painter, _pace_ Madame Vigee-Lebrun, has yet held her own with contemporaries even. To-day there are at least three--Marie Laurencin, Goncharova, and Vanessa Bell--whose claim to take rank amongst the best of their generation will have to be answered very carefully by those who wish to disallow it. Behind them press half a dozen less formidable but still serious candidates, and I wish Mr. Fry would bring together a small collection of their works. It would be interesting to see how and how much they differ from the men; and, unless I mistake, it would effectively give the lie to those who fancifully conclude that because the Muses were women it is for women to inspire rather than create. FOOTNOTE: [20] This article was written for the _Nation_, but owing to a series of misfortunes could not be published until the exhibition was over. It then seemed best to reserve it for this collection. CONTEMPORARY ART IN ENGLAND [Sidenote: _Burlington Magazine July 1917_] Only last summer, after going round the London galleries, a foreign writer on art whose name is as well known in America as on the Continent, remarked gloomily, and in private of course, that he quite understood why British art was almost unknown outside Great Britain. The early work of Englishmen, he admitted, showed talent and charming sensibility often, but, somehow or other, said he, their gifts fail to mature. They will not become artists, they prefer to remain British painters. They are hopelessly provincial, he said; and so they are.