1910] The Post-Impressionist Pictures 329 



The Conference about the House of Lords has broken down, and there 

 is a strike of miners with fierce riots in Wales. 



"nth Nov. — The ex-Shah of Persia has suddenly appeared at 

 Vienna, after having disappeared from Odessa, where he was a month 

 ago. This means more than meets the eye, for an Oriental ex-King is 

 a card in the hand of any European Government which wants a foot- 

 ing in an Eastern State. I should not be surprised if this one was 

 taken up by our and the Russian Governments to be restored at 

 Teheran or Kirman, as Tewfik was restored in 1882 at Cairo, with a 

 joint Anglo-Russian occupation indefinitely continued. 



" 12th Nov. — There is an article in the ' Pall Mall,' which is usually 

 well-informed about Foreign Office affairs, lamenting the failure of 

 British policy in the East and announcing as certain that Turkey has 

 joined the Triple Alliance, or rather the Dual Alliance of Germany and 

 Austria, and that an arrangement has been come to between these and 

 Russia for the construction of a railway through Bagdad and Persia 

 to the Indian frontier, which will put India at the mercy of Germany, 

 a death-blow to the British Empire. Redmond has returned from 

 America with £40,000 for the coming electoral campaign. 



" 14th Nov. — To London for the meeting of Parliament, which is 

 to-morrow, and to the Reform Club to concert with Mackarness an 

 opposition to Grey's Eastern policy and the formation of a new Egyptian 

 Committee. 



" 15th Nov. — To the Grafton Gallery to look at what are called the 

 Post-Impressionist pictures sent over from Paris. The exhibition is 

 either an extremely bad joke or a swindle. I am inclined to think the 

 latter, for there is no trace of humour in it. Still less is there a trace 

 of sense or skill or taste, good or bad, or art or cleverness. Nothing 

 but that gross puerility which scrawls indecencies on the walls of a 

 privy. The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of 

 seven or eight years old, the sense of colour that of a tea-tray painter, 

 the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after 

 spitting on them. There is nothing at all more humorous than that, 

 at all more clever. In all the 300 or 400 pictures there was not one 

 worthy of attention even by its singularity, or appealing to any feeling 

 but of disgust. I am wrong. There was one picture signed Gauguin 

 which at a distance had a pleasing effect of colour. Examined closer 

 I found it to represent three figures of brown people, probably South 

 Sea Islanders, one of them a woman suckling a child, all repulsively 

 ugly, but of a good general dark colouring, such as one sees in old 

 pictures blackened by candle smoke. One of the figures wore a scarlet 

 wrapper, and there was a patch of green sky in the corner of the pic- 

 ture. Seen from across the room the effect of colour was good. Apart 

 from the frames, the whole collection should not be worth £5, and then 



