This is leaving out of count the tiles in the South Kensington refreshment room and the “æsthetic period,” and a million other such varieties. What incredible distances the art-parasite travels! Is Western Europe too uncertain of to-morrow, the collapse of religion too dislocating, Great Wars too untimely, for us to have an art that is any more than locally or individually constructive? I am convinced that the sooner the general European destiny of painting gets out of the hands of the dealers’ ring in Paris the better for it. Also the hysterical second-rate Frenchman, with his morbid hankering after his mother-tradition, the eternal Græco-Roman, should be discouraged. And I think that Picasso could be indicted of more than a personal and excusable vacillation. And his personal limitations should be stated and understood, as Cézanne’s, or any other individual man’s should be, where they conflict with anything that is more living even than the individual. _General Nature and the Specialised Sense_ When it was necessary in this country and elsewhere to undertake a rapid education of a Public of some sort, some exaggeration had to be indulged in. If a man was persuaded of the reality of his enthusiasms, the position had to be posed _too logically_ for reality, or to be exact. Also everything in the innovation that contradicted the tenets of the prevalent and tired sensibility had to be thrown into a crude saillance. But to-day this necessity no longer exists. Yet writers supporting, more or less, the great movement in painting going on everywhere in Europe, still repeat the lesson as it was given them. The statement, for instance, that a man’s head is no more and no less important than a pumpkin indicates a considerable truth: it depends in what connection, only, that it is advanced and how applied. The ideal of the pure visual has obviously no preoccupation but formal and colour ones. But when you say that Cézanne, an heroic visual pure, in his portrait of the two men playing cards, was emotionally moved only by the form and colour, you are omitting a great sub-conscious travail of the emotion which fashioned along with the pure painter’s sense; dyeing with a sombreness and rough vitality everything that he did. There is no painter’s sense, admittedly, so “unbiological” that it can be independent of this extra-sensual activity of the painter’s nature. His disposition, his temper, his stubbornness, or his natural gaiety are all there in his specialised sense. Given the undoubted and fundamental rightness of this sense, it is an open question how far the emotional non-specialised activity of the mind should be stimulated and how explicit its participation should be in the work of a painter.