through the ages, now broad now narrow, now deep now shallow, now rapid
now sluggish: its colour is changing always. But who can set a mark
against the exact point of change? In the earlier nineteenth century
the stream ran very low. In the days of the Impressionists, against whom
the contemporary movement is in some ways a reaction, it had already
become copious. Any attempt to dam and imprison this river, to choose
out a particular school or movement and say: "Here art begins and there
it ends," is a pernicious absurdity. That way Academization lies. At
this moment there are not above half a dozen good painters alive who do
not derive, to some extent, from Cézanne, and belong, in some sense, to
the Post-Impressionist movement; but tomorrow a great painter may arise
who will create significant form by means superficially opposed to those
of Cézanne. Superficially, I say, because, essentially, all good art is
of the same movement: there are only two kinds of art, good and bad.
Nevertheless, the division of the stream into reaches, distinguished by
differences of manner, is intelligible and, to historians at any rate,
useful. The reaches also differ from each other in volume; one period of
art is distinguished from another by its fertility. For a few fortunate
years or decades the output of considerable art is great. Suddenly it
ceases; or slowly it dwindles: a movement has exhausted itself. How far
a movement is made by the fortuitous synchronisation of a number of
good artists, and how far the artists are helped to the creation of
significant form by the pervasion of some underlying spirit of the age,
is a question that can never be decided beyond cavil. But however the
credit is to be apportioned--and I suspect it should be divided about
equally--we are justified, I think, looking at the history of art as a
whole, in regarding such periods of fertility as distinct parts of that
whole. Primarily, it is as a period of fertility in good art and artists
that I admire the Post-Impressionist movement. Also, I believe that the
principles which underlie and inspire that movement are more likely to