with at greater length
elsewhere. Here I shall have a chance of raising them, and at least
suggesting a solution.

Primitives produce art because they must; they have no other motive than
a passionate desire to express their sense of form. Untempted, or
incompetent, to create illusions, to the creation of form they devote
themselves entirely. Presently, however, the artist is joined by a
patron and a public, and soon there grows up a demand for "speaking
likenesses." While the gross herd still clamours for likeness, the
choicer spirits begin to affect an admiration for cleverness and skill.
The end is in sight. In Europe we watch art sinking, by slow degrees,
from the thrilling design of Ravenna to the tedious portraiture of
Holland, while the grand proportion of Romanesque and Norman
architecture becomes Gothic juggling in stone and glass. Before the late
noon of the Renaissance art was almost extinct. Only nice illusionists
and masters of craft abounded. That was the moment for a
Post-Impressionist revival.

For various reasons there was no revolution. The tradition of art
remained comatose. Here and there a genius appeared and wrestled with
the coils of convention and created significant form. For instance, the
art of Nicolas Poussin, Claude, El Greco, Chardin, Ingres, and Renoir,
to name a few, moves us as that of Giotto and Cezanne moves. The bulk,
however, of those who flourished between the high Renaissance and the
contemporary movement may be divided into two classes, virtuosi and
dunces. The clever fellows, the minor masters, who might have been
artists if painting had not absorbed all their energies, were throughout
that period for ever setting themselves technical acrostics and solving
them. The dunces continued to elaborate chromophotographs, and continue.

The fact that significant form was the only common quality in the works
that moved me, and that in the works that moved me most and seemed most
to move the most sensitive people--in primitive art, that is to say--it
was almost the only quality, had led me to my hypothesis before ever I
became familiar with the works of Cezanne and his followers. Cezanne
carried me off my feet before ever I noticed that his strongest
characteristic was an insistence on the supremacy of significant form.
When I noticed this, my admiration for Cezanne and some of his followers
confirmed me in my aesthetic theories. Naturally I had found no
difficulty in liking them since