t _pastiche_. It has been
said that it expresses the soul of Serbia. I know nothing of that. What
I do know, what every one familiar with modern art knows, is that it
expresses nothing but what can be learnt by any clever student in the
schools of Vienna, Munich, and Paris.

II

ENGLISH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS

[Sidenote: _Nation Oct. 1913_]

It is said that Cezanne was in the habit of describing himself as a
pupil of Camille Pissarro. The belief is popular, and may be well
founded; at any rate, it has emboldened Mr. Rutter to overstock his
"Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition" with unimportant works by
this distinguished Impressionist. Surely a couple of examples would have
sufficed to illustrate the latest, and best, theory of aesthetics. For
that is the service performed on this occasion by the works of Pissarro.
They mark that difference in purpose between three schools, an
understanding of which will enable the intelligent student to pick his
way across the depths and shallows of contemporary art.

The romantic artists of the early nineteenth century used form and
colour to describe situations and comment on life. There are no examples
of their work in this exhibition; but, as we shall see, the Futurists
are unconsciously harking back to their theories. The Impressionists,
in rebellion, used form and colour to register their visual impressions;
they belong to the age of science and state facts without comment. But
every romantic or impressionist painter who happened to be an artist
also used form and colour as means of expressing and provoking pure
aesthetic emotion. It was not his fault if he flew in the face of party
principles; he was an artist and he could not help it. Cezanne was not
only a very great artist; he was what is almost as rare, a thoughtful
one. So, in his later periods, he came to use form and colour solely as
means of expressing and provoking those extraordinary emotions that
arise from the contemplation of real or imagined form. His theory
quarrels with no vital school of art that has ever existed. He merely
sifted the grain from the chaff, the relevant from the irrelevant.

_The Lake_, by Cezanne, is therefore the most important aesthetic
document in this exhibition besides being the best picture. Cezanne set
modern art on the right road. The revolutionary doctrine he bequeathed
to Post-Impressionism is a truth as old as the Neolithic Age--the truth
that forms and colours are