by employing forms sufficiently distorted to disconcert and baffle human interest and curiosity yet sufficiently representative to call immediate attention to the nature of the design, have found a short way to our aesthetic emotions.  This does not make Post-Impressionist pictures better or worse than others; it makes them more easily appreciable as works of art.  Probably it will always be difficult for the mass of men to consider pictures as works of art, but it will be less difficult for them so to consider Post-Impressionist than realistic pictures; while, if they ceased to consider objects unprovided with representative clues (e.g. some oriental textiles) as historical monuments, they would find it very difficult to consider them at all.

To assure his design, the artist makes it his first care to simplify.  But mere simplification, the elimination of detail, is not enough.  The informatory forms that remain have got to be made significant.  The representative element, if it is not to injure the design, must become a part of it; besides giving information it has got to provoke aesthetic emotion.  That is where symbolism fails.  The symbolist eliminates, but does not assimilate.  His symbols, as a rule, are not significant forms, but formal intelligencers.  They are not integral parts of a plastic conception, but intellectual abbreviations.  They are not informed by the artist’s emotion, they are invented by his intellect.  They are dead matter in a living organism.  They are rigid and tight because they are not traversed by the rhythm of the design.  The explanatory legends that illustrators used to produce from the mouths of their characters are not more foreign to visual art than the symbolic forms with which many able draughtsmen have ruined their designs.  In the famous “Melancholia,” and, to some extent, in a few other engravings—­“St. Eustace,” for instance, and “The Virgin and Child” (B. 34.  British Museum),—­Duerer has managed to convert a mass of detail into tolerably significant form; but in the greater part of his work (e.g. “The Knight,” “St. Jerome”) fine conception is hopelessly ruined by a mass of undigested symbolism.

Every form in a work of art has, then, to be made aesthetically significant; also every form has to be made a part of a significant whole.  For, as generally happens, the value of the parts combined into a whole is far greater than the value of the sum of the parts.  This organisation of forms into a significant whole is called Design; and an insistence—­an exaggerated insistence some will say—­on design is the fourth characteristic of the Contemporary Movement.  This insistence, this conviction that a work should not be good on the whole, but as a whole, is, no doubt, in part a reaction from the rather too easy virtue of some of the Impressionists, who were content to cover their canvases with charming forms and colours, not caring overmuch whether or how they were co-ordinated.  Certainly this was a weakness in Impressionism—­though by no means in all the Impressionist masters—­for it is certain that the profoundest emotions are provoked by significant combinations of significant forms.  Also, it seems certain that only in these organised combinations can the artist express himself completely.