Note (return) — CLIVE BELL

Yet I daresay it was this jovial and unaffected good-fellowship, quite as much as his unquestionable genius, that won the brave douanier his place in the hearts of those brilliant people who frequented what he used to call his "soirées toutes familiales et artistiques." The artists and intellectuals of my generation—the generation that received and went down before the terrific impact of Dostoievskyism—pursued the simple and unsophisticated at least as earnestly as any follower of an earlier Rousseau. Whatever the real differences between a noble savage and an unspoilt artisan may be, the difference between the ideas of them with which a jaded society diverts itself is negligible. "Il nous faut les barbares," said Gide. Well, we have got them.H And, maybe, the next generation but one will make as much fuss about a new Matthew Arnold as we made about Marguerite Audoux.