to the former could he bring a
crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions. But
the perfect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is
raised above the accidents of time and place. To him the problems of
archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent. If the forms of a
work are significant its provenance is irrelevant. Before the grandeur
of those Sumerian figures in the Louvre he is carried on the same flood
of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more than four thousand
years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried. It is the mark of great art
that its appeal is universal and eternal.[3] Significant form stands
charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of
feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change
their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the
intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another; only great
art remains stable and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure
because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place,
because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a
sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms
that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in
Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all
lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of
aesthetic ecstasy.

II

AESTHETICS AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM

By the light of my aesthetic hypothesis I can read more clearly than
before the history of art; also I can see in that history the place of
the contemporary movement. As I shall have a great deal to say about the
contemporary movement, perhaps I shall do well to seize this moment,
when the aesthetic hypothesis is fresh in my mind and, I hope, in the
minds of my readers, for an examination of the movement in relation to
the hypothesis. For anyone of my generation to write a book about art
that said nothing of the movement dubbed in this country
Post-Impressionist would be a piece of pure affectation. I shall have a
great deal to say about it, and therefore I wish to see at the earliest
possible opportunity how Post-Impressionism stands with regard to my
theory of aesthetics. The survey will give me occasion for stating some
of the things that Post-Impressionism is and some that it is not. I
shall have to raise points that will be dealt