Braque and Picasso have _changed_, indeed, the form-content before them, and with which they have dealt. Witness their little Nature-morte concoctions. But it has only been the débris of their rooms. Had they devoted as much of their attention to changing our common life, in every way not only the bigger, but the more vital and vivid game, they would have been finer and more useful figures: less precious, but not less good, artists. Two things, then, have made this indifference displayed by most artists to their form-content come to be regarded as a virtue. One is the general scepticism and discouragement which is a natural result of the conditions of our time. Intellectual exhaustion is the order of the day; and the work most likely to find acceptance with men in their present mood is that work that most vigorously and plainly announces the general bankruptcy and its own perdition. For the need of expression is, in a sense, never more acute than when people are imperturbably convinced of its futility. So the most living become the most life-like wax-works of the dead. The painter stands in this year in Europe like an actor without a stage. Russia is a chaos; whether a good one or a bad one remains to be seen. Writing in Paris has fallen among the lowest talents. Painting is plunged into a tired orgy of colour-matching. A tessaract broods over Cézanne’s apples. A fatuous and bouffonne mandolin has been brought from Spain; an illusive guitarist twangs formal airs amid the débris. Germany has been stunned and changed; for the better, pious hope says. But for the present art is not likely to revive there. A great new vivacity seemed to spring up some ten years ago in the art of painting; and a number of the younger painters are embarked on an enterprise that involves considerable sacrifices and discomforts, an immense amount of application, and eager belief. This local effort has to contend with the scepticism of a shallow, tired and uncertain time; there is no great communal or personal force in the Western World of to-day, unless some new political hegemony supply it, for art to build on and to which to relate itself. It is of importance, therefore, to a variety of painters, who have put their lives into this adventure, that it should not be, through the mistakes, the cupidity, or the scepticism of their leaders, or one mischance or another, brought to wreck. This part of my pamphlet deals with a track at the head of which a board advising avoidance should be placed; or, rather, against two tracks. For the Braque Nature-morte phase, and the David-Ingres phase in which painters in Paris are at present indulging is the same sort of thing, different as the results (a small abstract Nature-morte, and a large painting à la David) may appear. _Our Æsthetes and Plank-Art_