[Footnote 17:  Owing to the English invention of “Perpendicular,” the least unsatisfactory style of Gothic architecture, the English find it hard to realise the full horrors of late Gothic.]

[Footnote 18:  In speaking of officialdom it is not the directors of galleries and departments whom I have in mind.  Many of them are on the right side; we should all be delighted to see Sir Charles Holroyd or Mr. Maclagan, for instances, let loose amongst the primitives with forty thousand pounds in pocket.  I am thinking of those larger luminaries who set their important faces against the acquisition of works of art, the men who have been put in authority over directors and the rest of us.]

[Footnote 19:  The Mabuse, however, was a bargain that the merchants and money-lenders who settle these things could hardly be expected to resist.  The ticket price is said to have been L120,000.]

[Footnote 20:  It was Mr. Roger Fry who made this illuminating discovery.]

[Footnote 21:  It is pleasant to remember that by the painters, critics, and rich amateurs of “the old gang” the pictures of Ingres were treated as bad jokes.  Ingres was accused of distortion, ugliness, and even of incompetence!  His work was called “mad” and “puerile.”  He was derided as a pseudo-primitive, and hated as one who would subvert the great tradition by trying to put back the clock four hundred years.  The same authorities discovered in 1824 that Constable’s Hay Wain was the outcome of a sponge full of colour having been thrown at a canvas. Nous avons change tout ca.]

[Footnote 22:  As Mr. Walter Sickert reminds me, there was Sickert.]

IV

THE MOVEMENT

I. THE DEBT TO CEZANNE

II.  SIMPLIFICATION AND DESIGN

III.  THE PATHETIC FALLACY

[Illustration:  CEZANNE
Photo, Druet]

I

THE DEBT TO CEZANNE

That with the maturity of Cezanne a new movement came to birth will hardly be disputed by anyone who has managed to survive the “nineties”; that this movement is the beginning of a new slope is a possibility worth discussing, but about which no decided opinion can yet be held.  In so far as one man can be said to inspire a whole age, Cezanne inspires the contemporary movement:  he stands a little apart, however, because he is too big to take a place in any scheme of historical development; he is one of those figures that dominate an age and are not to be fitted into any of the neat little pigeon-holes so thoughtfully prepared for us by evolutionists.  He passed through the greater part of life unnoticed, and came near creeping out of it undiscovered.  No one seems to have guessed at what was happening.  It is easy now to see how much we owe to him, and how little he owed to anyone; for us it is easy to see what Gaugin and Van Gogh borrowed—­in 1890, the year in which the latter died, it was not so.  They were sharp eyes, indeed, that discerned before the dawn of the new century that Cezanne had founded a movement.