by. It is
very hard at first sight to appreciate the design of a picture by a
highly realistic artist--Ingres, for instance; our aesthetic emotions
are overlaid by our human curiosity. We do not see the figures as forms,
because we immediately think of them as people. On the other hand, a
design composed of purely imaginary forms, without any cognitive clue
(say a Persian carpet), if it be at all elaborate and intricate, is apt
to non-plus the less sensitive spectators. Post-Impressionists, by
employing forms sufficiently distorted to disconcert and baffle human
interest and curiosity yet sufficiently representative to call immediate
attention to the nature of the design, have found a short way to our
aesthetic emotions. This does not make Post-Impressionist pictures
better or worse than others; it makes them more easily appreciable as
works of art. Probably it will always be difficult for the mass of men
to consider pictures as works of art, but it will be less difficult for
them so to consider Post-Impressionist than realistic pictures; while,
if they ceased to consider objects unprovided with representative clues
(_e.g._ some oriental textiles) as historical monuments, they would find
it very difficult to consider them at all.

To assure his design, the artist makes it his first care to simplify.
But mere simplification, the elimination of detail, is not enough. The
informatory forms that remain have got to be made significant. The
representative element, if it is not to injure the design, must become a
part of it; besides giving information it has got to provoke aesthetic
emotion. That is where symbolism fails. The symbolist eliminates, but
does not assimilate. His symbols, as a rule, are not significant forms,
but formal intelligencers. They are not integral parts of a plastic
conception, but intellectual abbreviations. They are not informed by the
artist's emotion, they are invented by his intellect. They are dead
matter in a living organism. They are rigid and tight because they are
not traversed by the rhythm of the design. The explanatory legends that
illustrators used to produce from the mouths of their characters are not
more foreign to visual art than the symbolic forms with which many able
draughtsmen have ruined their designs. In the famous "Melancholia," and,
to some extent, in a few other engravings--"St. Eustace," for instance,
and "The Virgin and Child" (B. 34. British Museum),--Duerer has managed
to c