culture to exclaim indignantly, as one did to me not long ago, "I can't
think why you don't like it: it's Post-Impressionist, isn't it?"

If we cannot lose this habit of calling artists names, at least let us
know exactly what we mean by them. By associating artists with movements
and counter-movements we encourage the superstition that in art there is
some important distinction besides the distinction between good art and
bad. There is not. Such distinctions as can be drawn between the
genuine artists of one age and another, between traditional artists and
eccentrics, though serviceable to historians and archæologists, are
pitfalls for critics and amateurs. To him who can help us better to
appreciate works of art let us be duly grateful: to him who, from their
extraneous qualities, can deduce amusing theories or pleasant fancies
we will listen when we have time: but to him who would persuade us that
their value can in any way depend on some non-æsthetic quality we must
be positively rude. Now, if we are to get rid of those misleading labels
from which works of art are supposed to derive a value over and above
their æsthetic value, the first to go should be those arch-deceivers,
"traditional" and "revolutionary." Let us understand that tradition is
nothing but the essence, congealed and preserved for us by the masters
in their works, of innumerable movements; and that movements are mere
phases of the tradition from which they spring and in which they are
swallowed up. We shall then be armed, on the one hand, against the
solemn bore who requires us to admire his imitation of an old master
because it is in the tradition; on the other, against the portentous
"Ist," whose parthenogenetic masterpiece we are not in a state to relish
till we have sucked down the pseudo-philosophic bolus that embodies his
eponymous "Ism." To each we shall make the same reply: "Be so good as to
remove your irrelevant label and we will endeavour to judge your work on
its merits."