be no accidental charm of soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro.  They do not admire the austere determination of these young men to make their work independent and self-supporting and unbeholden to adventitious dainties.  They cannot understand this passion for works that are admirable as wholes, this fierce insistence on design, this willingness to leave bare the construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to a conception of the plan.  Critics of the Impressionist age are vexed by the naked bones and muscles of Post-Impressionist pictures.  But, for my own part, even though these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far from blaming a band of ascetics who in an age of unorganised prettiness insisted on the paramount importance of design.

III

THE PATHETIC FALLACY

Many of those who are enthusiastic about the movement, were they asked what they considered its most important characteristic, would reply, I imagine, “The expression of a new and peculiar point of view.”  “Post-Impressionism,” I have heard people say, “is an expression of the ideas and feelings of that spiritual renaissance which is now growing into a lusty revolution.”  With this I cannot, of course, agree.  If art expresses anything, it expresses some profound and general emotion common, or at least possible, to all ages, and peculiar to none.  But if these sympathetic people mean, as I believe they do, that the art of the new movement is a manifestation of something different from—­they will say larger than—­itself, of a spiritual revolution in fact, I will not oppose them.  Art is as good an index to the spiritual state of this age as of another; and in the effort of artists to free painting from the clinging conventions of the near past, and to use it as a means only to the most sublime emotions, we may read signs of an age possessed of a new sense of values and eager to turn that possession to account.  It is impossible to visit a good modern exhibition without feeling that we are back in a world not altogether unworthy to be compared with that which produced primitive art.  Here are men who take art seriously.  Perhaps they take life seriously too, but if so, that is only because there are things in life (aesthetic ecstasy, for instance) worth taking seriously.  In life, they can distinguish between the wood and the few fine trees.  As for art, they know that it is something more important than a criticism of life; they will not pretend that it is a traffic in amenities; they know that it is a spiritual necessity.  They are not making handsome furniture, nor pretty knick-knacks, nor tasteful souvenirs; they are creating forms that stir our most wonderful emotions.