Insistence on design is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the movement.  To all are familiar those circumambient black lines that are intended to give definition to forms and to reveal the construction of the picture.  For almost all the younger artists,—­Bonnard is an obvious exception—­affect that architectural method of design which indeed has generally been preferred by European artists.  The difference between “architectural design” and what I call “imposed design” will be obvious to anyone who compares a picture by Cezanne with a picture by Whistler.  Better still, compare any first-rate Florentine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century with any Sung picture.  Here are two methods of achieving the same end, equally good, so far as I can judge, and as different as possible.  We feel towards a picture by Cezanne or Masaccio or Giotto as we feel towards a Romanesque church; the design seems to spring upwards, mass piles itself on mass, forms balance each other masonrywise:  there is a sense of strain, and of strength to meet it.  Turn to a Chinese picture; the forms seem to be pinned to the silk or to be hung from above.  There is no sense of thrust or strain; rather there is the feeling of some creeper, with roots we know not where, that hangs itself in exquisite festoons along the wall.  Though architectural design is a permanent characteristic of Western art, of four periods I think it would be fairly accurate to say that it is a characteristic so dominant as to be distinctive; and they are Byzantine VIth Century, Byzantine IX-XIIIth Century, Florentine XIVth and XVth Century, and the Contemporary Movement.

To say that the artists of the movement insist on design is not to deny that some of them are exceptionally fine colourists.  Cezanne is one of the greatest colourists that ever lived; Henri-Matisse is a great colourist.  Yet all, or nearly all, use colour as a mode of form.  They design in colour, that is in coloured shapes.  Very few fall into the error of regarding colour as an end in itself, and of trying to think of it as something different from form.  Colour in itself has little or no significance.  The mere juxtaposition of tones moves us hardly at all.  As colourists themselves are fond of saying, “It is the quantities that count.”  It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colours, and the combinations of those shapes, that we recognise the colourist.  Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form.  It is a virtue in contemporary artists that they have set their faces against the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour without much considering their formal relations, and that they attempt so to organise tones as to raise form to its highest significance.  But it is not surprising that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those black lines that seem to do violence to their darling.  They are irritated by pictures in which there is to