The contemporary movement has pushed simplification a great deal further than Manet and his friends pushed it, thereby distinguishing itself from anything we have seen since the twelfth century.  Since the twelfth century, in sculpture and glass, the thirteenth, in painting and drawing, the drift has been towards realism and away from art.  Now the essence of realism is detail.  Since Zola, every novelist has known that nothing gives so imposing an air of reality as a mass of irrelevant facts, and very few have cared to give much else.  Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.  The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts.  But more than this was needed.  There were irrelevancies introduced into pictures for other purposes than that of statement.  There were the irrelevancies of technical swagger.  Since the twelfth century there has been a steady elaboration of technical complexities.  Writers with nothing to say soon come to regard the manipulation of words as an end in itself.  So cooks without eggs might come to regard the ritual of omelette-making, the mixing of condiments, the chopping of herbs, the stoking of fires, and the shaping of white caps, as a fine art.  As for the eggs,—­why that’s God business:  and who wants omelettes when he can have cooking?  The movement has simplified the batterie de cuisine.  Nothing is to be left in a work of art which merely shows that the craftsman knows how to put it there.

Alas!  It generally turns out that Life and Art are rather more complicated than we could wish; to understand exactly what is meant by simplification we must go deeper into the mysteries.  It is easy to say eliminate irrelevant details.  What details are not irrelevant?  In a work of art nothing is relevant but what contributes to formal significance.  Therefore all informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated.  But what most painters have to express can only be expressed in designs so complex and subtle that without some clue they would be almost unintelligible.  For instance, there are many designs that can only be grasped by a spectator who looks at them from a particular point of view.  Not every picture is as good seen upside down as upside up.  To be sure, very sensitive people can always discover from the design itself how it should be viewed, and, without much difficulty, will place correctly a piece of lace or embroidery in which there is no informatory clue to guide them.  Nevertheless, when an artist makes an intricate design it is tempting and, indeed, reasonable, for him to wish to provide a clue; and to do so he has only to work into his design some familiar object, a tree or a figure, and the business is done.  Having established a number of extremely subtle relations between highly complex forms, he may ask himself whether anyone else will be able to appreciate them.  Shall he not give