Broadly speaking we are changing from the _perfections_ of Impressionism to the _imperfections_ of Post-Impressionism; from the _achievements_ of a school, a movement, that has done the best it could, to the _attempts_, the _experiments_, the _gropings_, of new men along new lines. It is the purpose of this book to describe some of the changes that are taking place and _try_ to explain them in plain, every-day terms. The curse of art literature and professional art criticism is _art-jargon_. Every department of human activity from sport to science, baseball to philosophy, speedily develops its own jargon and the tendency is for the jargon to become denser and denser and so more and more obscure its subject, until some man with horse-sense--like Huxley in science and William James in philosophy--restores the use of every-day English. Some jargon like that of the baseball reporter is intensely vivid and amusing, it is language in the making, but the jargon of the art critic is deadly, it is neither vivid nor interesting--it is simply hypnotic. It is only when the critic gets so angry he forgets his jargon that he becomes intelligible--and betrays himself. The reputation of many a preacher, many an orator, depends wholly upon his command of jargon, his ability to utter endless phrases which are either stock ideas, old as the hills, or which _sound_ as if they meant something but on analysis prove quite barren. II POST-IMPRESSIONISM Post-Impressionism means exactly what the prefix means--the art-development _following_ Impressionism. It does not mean a further, or a higher, or a more subtle form of Impressionism, but it means something radically different, it means a _reaction_ from Impressionism. * * * * * The evolution of the new movement has been logical and inevitable. After the Barbizon school with its romantic representation of nature, there came inevitably the realistic painters, headed by Courbet, later by Manet--men who painted things not romantically but realistically, pitilessly, brutally. There was the same rage against these men as against the Cubists today. Both Whistler and Manet were in the Salon des Refuses of 1864. Along with the men who painted _things_ as they saw them, came naturally men like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, who tried endless experiments in the effort to paint _light_ as they saw it. So that the final twenty-five years of the last century were given up in France to attempts to paint _things_ and _light_ as they really are. After the painting of _things_ and _light_ one would say the art of painting had touched its limits, that there was nothing more to do. But, no, there is the painting of _neither_ things nor light--the painting of _emotions_--the painting of pure line and color compositions for the sake of the pleasure such harmonies afford--_the expression of one’s inner self_.