“Perhaps so. But I cannot get over a dislike for Latin facilities. Suarès finds a northern rhetoric of ideas in Ibsen, for instance, exactly similar to the word-rhetoric of the South. But in Latin countries you have a democracy of vitality, the best things of the earth are in everybody’s mouth and nerves. _The artist has to go and find them in the crowd._ You can’t have ‘freedom’ both ways. I prefer the _artist_ to be free, and the crowd not to be ‘artists.’ What does all English and German gush or sentiment, about the wonderful, the artistic French nation, etc., amount to? They gush because they find thirty-five million little Bésnards, little Botrels, little Bouchers, or little Bougereaus living together and prettifying their towns and themselves. Imagine England an immense garden city, on Letchworth lines (that is the name of a model Fabian township near London), or Germany (it almost has become that) a huge nouveau-art, reform-dressed, bestatued State. Practically every individual Frenchman of course has the filthiest taste imaginable. You are more astonished when you come across a sound, lonely, and severe artist in France than elsewhere. His vitality is hypnotically beset by an ocean of artistry. His best instinct is to become rather aggressively harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist like Rodin or the Cubists to-day arouse more fury in France than in England, for instance, is not because the French are _more interested in Art_! They are less interested in art, if anything. It is because they are all ‘artistic’ and all artists in the sense that a cheap illustrator or Mr. Brangwyn, R.A., or Mr. Waterhouse, R.A., are. They are _scandalized_ at good art; the English are inquisitive about and tickled by it, like gaping children. Their social instincts are not so developed and logical.” “But what difference does the attitude of the crowd make to the artist?” “Well, we were talking about Paris, which is the creation of the crowd. The man thinking in these gardens to-day, the man thinking on the quays of Amsterdam three centuries ago, think much the same thoughts. Thought is like climate and chemistry. It even has its physical type. But the individual’s _projection of himself_ he must entrust to his _milieu_. I maintain that the artist’s work is nowhere so unsafe as in the hands of an ‘artistic’ vulgarly alive public. The other question is his relation to the receptive world, and his bread and cheese. Paris is, to begin with, no good for bread and cheese, except as a market to which American and Russian millionaire dealers come. Its intelligence is of great use. But no friendship is a substitute for the blood-tie; and intelligence is no substitute for the response that can only come from the narrower recognition of your kind. This applies to the best _type_ of art rather than work of very personal genius. Country is left behind by that. Intelligence also.”