Cezanne is the full-stop between impressionism and the contemporary movement.  Of course there is really no such thing as a full-stop in art any more than there is in nature.  Movement grows out of movement, and every artist is attached to the past by a thousand binders springing from a thousand places in the great stem of tradition.  But it is true that there is hardly one modern artist of importance to whom Cezanne is not father or grandfather, and that no other influence is comparable with his.  To be sure there is Seurat, of whom we shall hear more in the next ten years.  Although he died as long ago as 1891 his importance has not yet been fully realized, his discoveries have not been fully exploited, not yet has his extraordinary genius received adequate recognition.  Seurat may be the Giorgione of the movement.  Working in isolation and dying young, he is known to us only by a few pictures which reveal unmistakeable and mysterious genius; but I should not be surprised if from the next generation he were to receive honours equal almost to those paid Cezanne.

The brave douanier was hardly master enough to have great and enduring influence; nevertheless, the sincerity of his vision and directness of his method reinforced and even added to one part of the lesson taught by Cezanne:  also, it was he who—­by his pictures, not by doctrine of course—­sent the pick of the young generation to look at the primitives.  Such as it was, his influence was a genuinely plastic one, which is more, I think, than can be said for that of Gauguin or of Van Gogh.  The former seemed wildly exciting for a moment, partly because he flattened out his forms, designed in two dimensions, and painted without chiaroscuro in pure colours, but even more because he had very much the air of a rebel.  “Il nous faut les barbares,” said Andre Gide; “il nous faut les barbares,” said we all.  Well, here was someone who had gone to live with them, and sent home thrilling, and often very beautiful, pictures which could, if one chose, be taken as challenges to European civilization.  To a considerable extent the influence of Gauguin was literary, and therefore in the long run negligible.  It is a mistake on that account to suppose—­as many seem inclined to do—­that Gauguin was not a fine painter.

Van Gogh was a fine painter, too; but his influence, like that of Gauguin, has proved nugatory—­a fact which detracts nothing from the merit of his work.  He was fitted by his admirers into current social and political tendencies, and coupled with Charles-Louis Philippe as an apostle of sentimental anarchy.  Sentimental portraits of washerwomen and artisans were compared with Marie Donadieu and Bubu de Montparnasse; and by indiscreet enthusiasm the artist was degraded to the level of a preacher.  Nor was this degradation inexcusable:  Van Gogh was a preacher, and too often his delicious and sensitive works of art are smeared over, to their detriment, with tendencious propaganda.  At his best, however,