The Comparative Exhibition in New York over ten years ago proved that it is dangerous to mix disparate schools and aims and personalities. And while the undertaking was laudable, seeking as it did to dissipate our artistic provinciality, it but emphasised it—proved beyond the peradventure of a doubt American dependence on foreign art. Technically, to-day, the majority of our best painters stem from France, [Pg 258] as formerly they imitated English models or studied at Düsseldorf and Munich. When the Barbizon group made their influence felt our landscapists immediately betrayed the impact of the new vision, the new technique. Our younger men are just as progressive as were their fathers and grandfathers. Every fresh generation uses as a spring-board for its achievements the previous generation. They have a lot to put on canvas, new sights that only America can show. What matter the tools if they have, these young chaps, individuality? Must they continue to peer through the studio spectacles of their grandfathers? They make mistakes, as did their predecessors. They experiment; art is not a fixed quantity, but a ceaseless experimenting. They are often raw, crude, harsh; but they deal in character and actuality. They paint their environment—the only true historic method—and they do this with a modern technique. Manet, Goya, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler, and others may be noted in the technical schemes of nine out of ten native-born American artists. The question at issue is whether our new men have anything to say, and do they say it in a personal manner. I think the answer is a decided affirmative. We can\'t compete with the great names in art, but in the contemporary swim we fairly hold our own.

Consider our recent Academy exhibitions—and I prefer to take this stronghold of antiquated [Pg 259] art and prejudices as a starting-point rather than the work of the out-and-out insurgents—consider, I repeat, the Academy, and then try to recall, say, ten years ago and the pictures that then hung on the line. Decidedly, as Zola would say, there has been a cleaning up of dirty old palettes, an inrush of fresh air and sunshine. In landscape we excel, easily leading the English painters. Of Germany I do not care to speak here: the sea of mud that passes for colour, the clumsiness of handling, and the general heavy self-satisfaction discourage the most ardent champion of the Teutonic art. In England, Burlington House still sets the fashion. At one Royal Academy I attended I found throngs before a melodramatic anecdote by John Collier, entitled The Fallen Ideal. It had the rigidity of a tinted photograph. But it hit the "gallery," which dearly loves a story in paint. The two Sargent landscapes did not attract, yet they killed every picture within optical range. Nor was Collier\'s the worst offence in an enormous gathering of mediocre canvases. One must go, nowadays, to the New English Art Club to see the fine flower of new English art. There Augustus John reigns, but he is not to be confined in parochial limits; he is a "European event," not merely W............