charming, a little drunk and disorderly. But when he asserts that it was
David who rescued painting from their agreeable frivolity he must be
prepared for contradiction: some people will have it that it was rather
the pupil Ingres. David, they will say, was little better than a politic
pedagogue, who, observing that with the Revolution classical virtues and
classical costumes had come into fashion, that Brutus, the tyrannicide,
and Aristides, called "the just," were the heroes of the hour, suited
his manners to his company and gave the public an art worthy of highly
self-conscious liberals. The timely discoveries made at Herculaneum and
Pompeii, they will argue, stood him in good stead. From these he learnt
just how citizens and citizen-soldiers should be drawn; and he drew
them: with the result that the next generation of Frenchmen were
sighing:

Qui nous délivrera des Grecs et des Romains?

Whoever may have rescued European painting from the charming disorder of
the age of reason, there can be no question as to who saved it from the
riot of impressionism. That was the doing of the Post-Impressionists
headed by Cézanne. Forms and colours must be so organized as to compose
coherent and self-supporting wholes; that is the central conviction
which has inspired the art of the last twenty years. Order: that has
been the watchword; but order imposed from within. And order so imposed,
order imposed by the artist's inmost sense of what a work of art should
be, is something altogether different from the order obtained by
submission to a theory of painting. One springs from a personal
conviction; the other is enjoined by authority. Modern artists tend to
feel strongly the necessity for the former, and, if they be Frenchmen,
to believe intellectually in the propriety of the latter.