nd the combinations of those shapes, that we recognise the
colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. It is
a virtue in contemporary artists that they have set their faces against
the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour without much
considering their formal relations, and that they attempt so to organise
tones as to raise form to its highest significance. But it is not
surprising that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but
rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those
black lines that seem to do violence to their darling. They are
irritated by pictures in which there is to be no accidental charm of
soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro. They do not admire the austere
determination of these young men to make their work independent and
self-supporting and unbeholden to adventitious dainties. They cannot
understand this passion for works that are admirable as wholes, this
fierce insistence on design, this willingness to leave bare the
construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to a conception
of the plan. Critics of the Impressionist age are vexed by the naked
bones and muscles of Post-Impressionist pictures. But, for my own part,
even though these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness
exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far from blaming a
band of ascetics who in an age of unorganised prettiness insisted on the
paramount importance of design.

III

THE PATHETIC FALLACY

Many of those who are enthusiastic about the movement, were they asked
what they considered its most important characteristic, would reply, I
imagine, "The expression of a new and peculiar point of view."
"Post-Impressionism," I have heard people say, "is an expression of the
ideas and feelings of that spiritual renaissance which is now growing
into a lusty revolution." With this I cannot, of course, agree. If art
expresses anything, it expresses some profound and general emotion
common, or at least possible, to all ages, and peculiar to none. But if
these sympathetic people mean, as I believe they do, that the art of the
new movement is a manifestation of something different from--they will
say larger than--itself, of a spiritual revolution in fact, I will not
oppose them. Art is as good an index to the spiritual state of this age
as of another; and in the effort of artists to free painting from the
clinging conventions of the near past,