of a cup" in line and
colour: they had at their fingers' ends a plastic notation that
corresponded with the labels by which things are intellectually
recognized. They neither felt things nor expressed their feelings. For
even when an artist was capable of a direct, personal reaction it was
almost impossible for him not to lose it in the cogs and chains of that
elaborate machinery of scientific representation to which he had been
apprenticed. A determination to free artists from utilitarian vision and
the disastrous science of representation was the theoretic basis of that
movement which is associated with the name of Cezanne.

From the latter, at any rate, the _douanier_ needed no freeing. Such
science as he acquired in the course of his life was a means to
expressing himself and not to picture-making. As for his vision, that
was as direct and first-hand as the vision of a Primitive or a child;
and to a Primitive his admirers were in the habit of likening him, to a
child his detractors. His admirers were right: his art is not childish.
Primitives, because they are artists, have to grapple with the artistic
problem. They have, that is, to create form that will express an
emotional conception; they have to express their sense of something they
have seen and felt. A child may well have an artistic vision; for all
that, a child is never, or hardly ever, an artist. It wrestles with
no problem because it does not try to express anything. It is a mere
symbolist who uses a notation not to express what it feels but to convey
information. A child's drawing of a horse is not an expression of its
sense of a horse, but a symbol by which other people can recognize that
what occupies a certain position in its figured story is a horse. The
child is not an artist, but an illustrator who uses symbolism. When,
using Mr. Bertrand Russell's new symbolism, I say that L^c3nI--C^ct =
the Almighty, clearly I am not expressing my feeling for infinite and
omnipotent goodness. Neither does the child who teases you to look at
its charming coloured diagram of the farmyard expect you to share an
emotional experience. Doubtless the vanity of the craftsman demands
satisfaction; but chiefly the child wishes to assure itself that some
impartial judge can interpret its notation. One definitely artistic
gift, however, many children do possess, and that is a sense of the
decorative possibilities of their medium. This gift they have in
common with the Primi