There have been doubts, I am sorry to say, whether scholarship pursues honest intentions in its professed love for art. A master of rhetoric as well as of painting, Mr. Wyndham Lewis, has recently given vent to these doubts in that provocative book of his on the Demon of Progress in the Arts. His blast is directed against the critic, or what he calls the pundit-prophet, but we are told that that dangerous suitor has ‘recently promoted himself art historian’.

Despite the rhetoric, there is much in Wyndham Lewis’s book that deserves to be pondered. He is surely right that image-men and word-men live in different worlds. Michelangelo is said to have spent months in the quarries of Carrara, unable to tear himself away from the sight of all the marble blocks in which he saw the shapes of works without number waiting to be liberated. The scholar’s quarries are libraries.