The period in which we find ourselves in the year 1913 begins with the maturity of Cezanne (about 1885).  It therefore overlaps the Impressionist movement, which certainly had life in it till the end of the nineteenth century.  Whether Post-Impressionism will peter out as Impressionism has done, or whether it is the first flowering of a new artistic vitality with centuries of development before it, is, I have admitted, a matter of conjecture.  What seems to me certain is that those who shall be able to contemplate our age as something complete, as a period in the history of art, will not so much as know of the existence of the artisans still amongst us who create illusions and chaffer and quarrel in the tradition of the Victorians.  When they think of the early twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who tried to create form—­the artisans who tried to create illusions will be forgotten.  They will think of the men who looked to the present, not of those who looked to the past; and, therefore, it is of them alone that I shall think when I attempt to describe the contemporary movement.[25]

Already I have suggested two characteristics of the movement; I have said that in their choice of forms and colours most vital contemporary artists are, more or less, influenced by Cezanne, and that Cezanne has inspired them with the resolution to free their art from literary and scientific irrelevancies.  Most people, asked to mention a third, would promptly answer, I suspect—­Simplification.  To instance simplification as a peculiarity of the art of any particular age seems queer, since simplification is essential to all art.  Without it art cannot exist; for art is the creation of significant form, and simplification is the liberating of what is significant from what is not.  Yet to such depths had art sunk in the nineteenth century, that in the eyes of the rabble the greatest crime of Whistler and the Impressionists was their by no means drastic simplification.  And we are not yet clear of the Victorian slough.  The spent dip stinks on into the dawn.  You have only to look at almost any modern building to see masses of elaboration and detail that form no part of any real design and serve no useful purpose.  Nothing stands in greater need of simplification than architecture, and nowhere is simplification more dreaded and detested than amongst architects.  Walk the streets of London; everywhere you will see huge blocks of ready-made decoration, pilasters and porticoes, friezes and facades, hoisted on cranes to hang from ferro-concrete walls.  Public buildings have become public laughing-stocks.  They are as senseless as slag-heaps, and far less beautiful.  Only where economy has banished the architect do we see masonry of any merit.  The engineers, who have at least a scientific problem to solve, create, in factories and railway-bridges, our most creditable monuments.  They at least are not ashamed of their construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in beauty at thirty shillings a foot.  We shall have no more architecture in Europe till architects understand that all these tawdry excrescences have got to be simplified away, till they make up their minds to express themselves in the materials of the age—­steel, concrete, and glass—­and to create in these admirable media vast, simple, and significant forms.