ind alley. Its only
logical development would be an art-machine--a machine for establishing
values correctly, and determining what the eye sees scientifically,
thereby making the production of art a mechanical certainty. Such a
machine, I am told, was invented by an Englishman. Now if the
praying-machine be admittedly the last shift of senile religion, the
value-finding machine may fairly be taken for the psychopomp of art. Art
has passed from the primitive creation of significant form to the
highly civilised statement of scientific fact. I think the machine,
which is the intelligent and respectable end, should be preserved, if
still it exists, at South Kensington or in the Louvre, along with the
earlier monuments of the Christian slope. As for that uninteresting and
disreputable end, official nineteenth-century art, it can be studied in
a hundred public galleries and in annual exhibitions all over the world.
It is the mouldy and therefore the obvious end. The spirit that came to
birth with the triumph of art over Graeco-Roman realism dies with the
ousting of art by the picture of commerce.

But if the Impressionists, with their scientific equipment, their
astonishing technique, and their intellectualism, mark the end of one
era, do they not rumour the coming of another? Certainly to-day there is
stress in the cryptic laboratory of Time. A great thing is dead; but, as
that sagacious Roman noted:

"haud igitur penitus pereunt quaecumque videntur, quando alid ex
alio reficit natura nec ullam rem gigni patitur nisi morte adiuta
aliena."

And do not the Impressionists, with their power of creating works of art
that stand on their own feet, bear in their arms a new age? For if the
venial sin of Impressionism is a grotesque theory and its justification
a glorious practice, its historical importance consists in its having
taught people to seek the significance of art in the work itself,
instead of hunting for it in the emotions and interests of the outer
world.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: I am not being so stupid as to suggest that in the sixth
century the Hellenistic influence died. It persisted for another 300
years at least. In sculpture and ivory carving it was only ousted by the
Romanesque movement of the eleventh century. Inevitably a great deal of
Hellenistic stuff continued to be produced after the rise of Byzantine
art. For how many years after the maturity of Cezanne will painters
continue to pro