to name a few, moves us as that of Giotto and Cézanne moves. The bulk,
however, of those who flourished between the high Renaissance and the
contemporary movement may be divided into two classes, virtuosi and
dunces. The clever fellows, the minor masters, who might have been
artists if painting had not absorbed all their energies, were throughout
that period for ever setting themselves technical acrostics and solving
them. The dunces continued to elaborate chromophotographs, and continue.

The fact that significant form was the only common quality in the works
that moved me, and that in the works that moved me most and seemed most
to move the most sensitive people--in primitive art, that is to say--it
was almost the only quality, had led me to my hypothesis before ever I
became familiar with the works of Cézanne and his followers. Cézanne
carried me off my feet before ever I noticed that his strongest
characteristic was an insistence on the supremacy of significant form.
When I noticed this, my admiration for Cézanne and some of his followers
confirmed me in my aesthetic theories. Naturally I had found no
difficulty in liking them since I found in them exactly what I liked in
everything else that moved me.

There is no mystery about Post-Impressionism; a good Post-Impressionist
picture is good for precisely the same reasons that any other picture is
good. The essential quality in art is permanent. Post-Impressionism,
therefore, implies no violent break with the past. It is merely a
deliberate rejection of certain hampering traditions of modern growth.
It does deny that art need ever take orders from the past; but that is
not a badge of Post-Impressionism, it is the commonest mark of vitality.
Even to speak of Post-Impressionism as a movement may lead to
misconceptions; the habit of speaking of movements at all is rather
misleading. The stream of art has never run utterly dry: it flows