there was art in the violent colors of the other schools. We saw many lemons rolling down white-and-blue table-cloths, figures of beings that had lost all dignity of form, perspectives that were childish, draftsmanship that was ridiculous, paint put on the canvas in any way so that it did not suggest the suave technic of other days, a great absence of atmosphere, the thing that had been our religion a few years ago. Despite the lack of all these, which are a few of the many principles of our education, the principles of our great old masters, and a lack of the considerate politeness of our society and its garments of convention, there was life in Post-Impressionism. And if it had life, it had beauty; for they are inseparable.

I had come to appreciate. The obstacles in my vision had been pushed aside, and I saw clearly up the new avenues of thought.

How can any one do this? How can one brush away his habits and be able to appreciate? He will be surprised how rapidly it will come to pass if he is interested in pictures and sculpture, interested enough to go often to see them. The public will not have to overcome the technical education which blocked the artist's path, but will sooner get to the startingpoint on this new trail. But the public will always be divided into those who cannot forget, who reason as they were taught to reason, and into those whose minds respond more quickly to environment, to life, to discovery, and to new ideas.

It is the first division of the public that now, a year after that exhibition and at least seven years after the movement became prominent in Europe, is still hooting and decrying, talking of decay and hysteria, whenever Post-Impressionism becomes the subject of conversation. It includes people of all classes and professions, even painters and sculptors of all ranks and ages. In the second half

are just as many intelligent people, but they see that a new truth has been added to our knowledge, and one which will be welded into all future art.

If one belongs to that part of the first half who do not know much about pictures, yet find they give pleasure and material for thought and increase one's observation of nature, the only possible way to understand the language of painting is to go frequently to exhibitions and museums. One should not be satisfied with magazine illustrations and newspaper pictures. They may be good as far as they go, but they do not help in color, and contribute little to the growth of taste. Taste is like everything else in our natures: it grows only through exercise. Taste does not mean elegance, refinement, Chippendale furniture, sweet colors, and jewels, although its education may lead through all these until one can see and choose with intelligence. You may even now be going through the sweet color and “ideal head" stage of growth. If that be the case, little wonder the new art shocked the refined senses of some.

No one artist can represent all the beauty of life. Consequently, we have many schools each accentuating its particular point of view. No man can honestly like them all. But because your taste leads you along certain lines, do not deny the virtues in any other healthy movement, provided, of course, you are convinced that it is healthy. Be careful that you do not become over-refined, too elegant, too used to the pretty, to respond to the elemental truths when honestly and crudely presented in art.

The point of view of Post-Impressionism I have tried to sketch, and, as I said before, no one expects you to see it clearly in a short time. But I hope you will acknowledge that it is a very interesting one, the idea of being more a source of creation than, strictly speaking, holding the mirror up to nature.

I

VOICE the conviction of thousands of people when I say that the present era is one of the greatest artistic importance, and that it is made so by the noble line of painters that culminated in Cézanne, to go on to further realizations in the present and near future.

The word "moderns" is of course purely relative. Only a few years ago Professor Holmes wrote of Constable as the first of the moderns. Later André Suares spoke of Delacroix as the man from whom modern art is descended; perhaps Manet is the choice of the majority now, with a somewhat smaller, but increasing, number inclined to make the modern movement begin with Cézanne. The limits of the past and the accepted are constantly being set forward, and we see that the men who were thought to break most with tradition have only enriched it. The process keeps up today, and it is this that makes our time inspiring. We feel that we are alive and producing. We have learned the lessons of the past, including its greatest one, that we are worthy of our heritage and able to appreciate it only when we add to it. "Invent or perish," was the great warning of Ruskin. It will be my privilege to speak here of the men

who have preferred the former alternative.

They are men who justify their lives by their works, not by their artistic ancestry; nevertheless, as we are trying at present to understand these works better, it is worth while to glance backward and see how steadily the ideas of to-day have evolved from those of yesterday. With this in mind we shall be prepared to follow out in the Post-Impressionist and the Cubist pictures the continuing of the essential tradition of art, which is life, however they diverge from the unessential traditions of the manner of expressing it.

The history of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century is well known.

After the struggle between Classicism and Romanticism came the Realists. The Impressionist school, with its scientific analysis of light, completed their work. It would of course be false to deny to men like Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir the possession of the classic qualities of form and color. In the perfect achievement of Renoir they are so splendid that he must be ranked not with the lesser, but with the greater, classics.

But with these men the obtaining of the esthetic qualities was mostly instinctive; with Cézanne we have the all-important

evolution to an art where they are sought for consciously. A deep student of the old masters, like all the great French painters of the nineteenth century, Cézanne went further than any of his fellows, his mind being the profoundest of them all, in penetrating to the motives of the great gods of the museums. So, while a man of his time, he goes far beyond it in recognizing the supremacy over realism of the esthetic and expressive phases of the work of art. As he grew older, he centered his attention more and more on these matters, and was quite willing to let realism confine itself to a general, elemental statement of the form and color of his subject. The vast majority of the public saw at first only what it thought to be the

sacrifices of Cézanne's work. Now that he is better understood, and even the laymen are more occupied with his qualities than with his so-called defects, the rancor of those who oppose all change in the forms of art is transferred to the successors of Cézanne, who break still further with the superstition that a picture must look "just like nature." Only one who has carefully watched the crowds at such a manifestation as the International Exhibition of last spring can know what a vast number of people are ready to overcome this obstacle or have done so already.

For those who know him best, Cézanne is the greatest master of modern times, and one whom only the greatest of the old painters have equaled. He realizes the