of formal fashions in ages undominated by any
masterful genius. The spirit of an artistic age is, I suspect, a
composition that defies complete analysis; the work of one great mind is
generally one part of it, the monuments of some particular past age are
often another. Technical discoveries have sometimes led to artistic
changes. For instance, to men who have been in the habit of painting on
wood, the invention of canvas would suggest all sorts of fascinating
novelties. Lastly, there is a continual change in the appearance of
those familiar objects which are the raw material of most visual
artists. So, though the essential quality--significance--is constant, in
the choice of forms there is perpetual change; and these changes seem to
move in long flights or shorter jumps, so that we are able, with some
precision, to lay our fingers on two points between which there is a
certain amount of art possessing certain common characteristics. That
which lies between two such points historians call a period or movement.

The period in which we find ourselves in the year 1913 begins with the
maturity of Cezanne (about 1885). It therefore overlaps the
Impressionist movement, which certainly had life in it till the end of
the nineteenth century. Whether Post-Impressionism will peter out as
Impressionism has done, or whether it is the first flowering of a new
artistic vitality with centuries of development before it, is, I have
admitted, a matter of conjecture. What seems to me certain is that those
who shall be able to contemplate our age as something complete, as a
period in the history of art, will not so much as know of the existence
of the artisans still amongst us who create illusions and chaffer and
quarrel in the tradition of the Victorians. When they think of the early
twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who tried
to create form--the artisans who tried to create illusions will be
forgotten. They will think of the men who looked to the present, not of
those who looked to the past; and, therefore, it is of them alone that
I shall think when I attempt to describe the contemporary movement.[25]

Already I have suggested two characteristics of the movement; I have
said that in their choice of forms and colours most vital contemporary
artists are, more or less, influenced by Cezanne, and that Cezanne has
inspired them with the resolution to free their art from literary and
scientific irrelevancies. Most