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 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.