iscovery.]

[Footnote 21: It is pleasant to remember that by the painters, critics,
and rich amateurs of "the old gang" the pictures of Ingres were treated
as bad jokes. Ingres was accused of distortion, ugliness, and even of
incompetence! His work was called "mad" and "puerile." He was derided as
a pseudo-primitive, and hated as one who would subvert the great
tradition by trying to put back the clock four hundred years. The same
authorities discovered in 1824 that Constable's _Hay Wain_ was the
outcome of a sponge full of colour having been thrown at a canvas. _Nous
avons change tout ca._]

[Footnote 22: As Mr. Walter Sickert reminds me, there was Sickert.]

IV

THE MOVEMENT

I. THE DEBT TO CEZANNE

II. SIMPLIFICATION AND DESIGN

III. THE PATHETIC FALLACY

[Illustration: CEZANNE
_Photo, Druet_]

I

THE DEBT TO CEZANNE

That with the maturity of Cezanne a new movement came to birth will
hardly be disputed by anyone who has managed to survive the "nineties";
that this movement is the beginning of a new slope is a possibility
worth discussing, but about which no decided opinion can yet be held. In
so far as one man can be said to inspire a whole age, Cezanne inspires
the contemporary movement: he stands a little apart, however, because he
is too big to take a place in any scheme of historical development; he
is one of those figures that dominate an age and are not to be fitted
into any of the neat little pigeon-holes so thoughtfully prepared for us
by evolutionists. He passed through the greater part of life unnoticed,
and came near creeping out of it undiscovered. No one seems to have
guessed at what was happening. It is easy now to see how much we owe to
him, and how little he owed to anyone; for us it is easy to see what
Gaugin and Van Gogh borrowed--in 1890, the year in which the latter
died, it was not so. They were sharp eyes, indeed, that discerned before
the dawn of the new century that Cezanne had founded a movement.

That movement is still young. But I think it would be safe to say that
already it has produced as much good art as its predecessor. Cezanne, of
course, created far greater things than any Impressionist painter; and
Gaugin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, de Vlaminck, Derain,
Herbin, Marchand, Marquet, Bonnard, Duncan Grant, Maillol, Lewis,
Kandinsky, Brancuzi, von Anrep, Roger Fry, Friesz, Goncharova, L'Hote,
are R