[Illustration: (_Photo: E. Druet_) SEURAT]

SINCE CÉZANNE

With anyone who concludes that this preliminary essay is merely to
justify the rather appetizing title of my book I shall be at no pains to
quarrel. If privately I think it does more, publicly I shall not avow
it. Historically and critically, I admit, the thing is as slight as a
sketch contained in five-and-thirty pages must be, and certainly it adds
nothing to what I have said, in the essays to which it stands preface,
on æsthetic theory. The function it is meant to perform--no very
considerable one perhaps--is to justify not so much the title as the
shape of my book, giving, in the process, a rough sketch of the period
with certain aspects of which I am to deal. That the shape needs
justification is attributable to the fact that though all, or nearly
all, the component articles were written with a view to making one
volume, I was conscious, while I wrote them, of dealing with two
subjects. Sometimes I was discussing current ideas, and questions
arising out of a theory of art; at others I was trying to give some
account of the leading painters of the contemporary movement. Sometimes
I was writing of Theory, sometimes of Practice. By means of this preface
I hope to show why, at the moment, these two, far from being distinct,
are inseparable.

To understand thoroughly the contemporary movement--that movement in
every turn and twist of which the influence of Cézanne is traceable--the
movement which may be said to have come into existence contemporaneously
almost with the century, and still holds the field--it is necessary to
know something of the æsthetic theories which agitated it. One of the