cannot give men
genius; you can only give them freedom--freedom from superstition.
Post-Impressionism can no more make good artists than good laws can make
good men. Doubtless, with its increasing popularity, an annually
increasing horde of nincompoops will employ the so-called
"Post-Impressionist technique" for presenting insignificant patterns and
recounting foolish anecdotes. Their pictures will be dubbed
"Post-Impressionist," but only by gross injustice will they be excluded
from Burlington House. Post-Impressionism is no specific against human
folly and incompetence. All it can do for painters is to bring before
them the claims of art. To the man of genius and to the student of
talent it can say: "Don't waste your time and energy on things that
don't matter: concentrate on what does: concentrate on the creation of
significant form." Only thus can either give the best that is in him.
Formerly because both felt bound to strike a compromise between art and
what the public had been taught to expect, the work of one was
grievously disfigured, that of the other ruined. Tradition ordered the
painter to be photographer, acrobat, archaeologist and litterateur:
Post-Impressionism invites him to become an artist.

III

THE METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESIS

For the present I have said enough about the aesthetic problem and about
Post-Impressionism; I want now to consider that metaphysical
question--"Why do certain arrangements and combinations of form move us
so strangely?" For aesthetics it suffices that they do move us; to all
further inquisition of the tedious and stupid it can be replied that,
however queer these things may be, they are no queerer than anything
else in this incredibly queer universe. But to those for whom my theory
seems to open a vista of possibilities I willingly offer, for what they
are worth, my fancies.

It seems to me possible, though by no means certain, that created form
moves us so profoundly because it expresses the emotion of its creator.
Perhaps the lines and colours of a work of art convey to us something
that the artist felt. If this be so, it will explain that curious but
undeniable fact, to which I have already referred, that what I call
material beauty (_e.g._ the wing of a butterfly) does not move most of
us in at all the same way as a work of art moves us. It is beautiful
form, but it is not significant form. It moves us, but it does not move
us aesthetically. It is tempting to expl