In London

Anchored in conservatism, English art lets the tide pull, lets the wind go over; the name of Cezanne is a peril avoided, Modernism the mutter of a storm that never broke. Last week, at the opening of the Royal Academy's exhibition, the quality found with gratification that their Art was still safe, a painted ship upon a painted sea.

It was a wet May Day, bad for top hats. Ex-Premier Ramsay MacDonald came in a soft felt and a lounge suit, a fact which brought joy to the shires but caused a slight depression on the Exchange. Lords and ladies, Knights and gentlemen, they saw pictures that pleased them-suave specimens of super-photography in oil, executed by the hand of man, unassisted by any machine. Sir John Lavery's adept portraits of George Bernard Shaw, of Jockey Steve

Donoghue; two unremarkable Sargents; an effective landscape by a greengrocer, another by a violinist in a cinema theatre, all as definite as roast beef, all competent, all dull. There was, also, one exception.

"I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities . . . but principally I hate and detest that animal called man." So wrote the angry Irishman, Jonathan Swift. So has come to think that onetime cable of conservatism, Painter Sir William Orpen. His painting was the exception: A white bear stands in the glare of a Paris prize ring. There is blood at his feet; he has just consummated upon a human bruiser, now unconscious, brutalities so magnificent that spectators of every sex, replete with ecstasy at the spectacle, slobber and clip, heedless of an ape that sits among them, scrutinizing with remote but kindly cynicism their delirious reversion to the bestial. "Hogarthian," said the critics. "Horrible," said the quality.