meantime, Rembrandt and his contemporaries, notably Brouwer, left
their mark on French art in the work of Delacroix, Decamps and
Courbet, the way will be seen clearly open to Cezanne and
Gauguin.

The phrase "symbolist tradition" is not used to express any
conscious affinity between the various generations of artists. As
Kandinsky says: "the relationships in art are not necessarily
ones of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of
meaning." Sometimes, perhaps frequently, a similarity of outward
form will appear. But in tracing spiritual relationship only
inner meaning must be taken into account.

There are, of course, many people who deny that Primitive Art had
an inner meaning or, rather, that what is called "archaic
expression" was dictated by anything but ignorance of
representative methods and defective materials. Such people are
numbered among the bitterest opponents of Post-Impressionism, and
indeed it is difficult to see how they could be otherwise.
"Painting," they say, "which seeks to learn from an age when art
was, however sincere, incompetent and uneducated, deliberately
rejects the knowledge and skill of centuries." It will be no easy
matter to conquer this assumption that Primitive art is merely
untrained Naturalism, but until it is conquered there seems
little hope for a sympathetic understanding of the symbolist
ideal.

The task is all the more difficult because of the analogy drawn
by friends of the new movement between the neo-primitive vision
and that of a child. That the analogy contains a grain of truth