[19] 1917: A friendly critic reading this paragraph suggests that it might stand fairly as a description of Me[vs]trovi['c]. I cannot agree. Epstein is in every respect superior to the Serbian sculptor, in whose work there can be no question of anything but _pastiche_. It has been said that it expresses the soul of Serbia. I know nothing of that. What I do know, what every one familiar with modern art knows, is that it expresses nothing but what can be learnt by any clever student in the schools of Vienna, Munich, and Paris. II ENGLISH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS [Sidenote: _Nation Oct. 1913_] It is said that Cezanne was in the habit of describing himself as a pupil of Camille Pissarro. The belief is popular, and may be well founded; at any rate, it has emboldened Mr. Rutter to overstock his "Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition" with unimportant works by this distinguished Impressionist. Surely a couple of examples would have sufficed to illustrate the latest, and best, theory of aesthetics. For that is the service performed on this occasion by the works of Pissarro. They mark that difference in purpose between three schools, an understanding of which will enable the intelligent student to pick his way across the depths and shallows of contemporary art. The romantic artists of the early nineteenth century used form and colour to describe situations and comment on life. There are no examples of their work in this exhibition; but, as we shall see, the Futurists are unconsciously harking back to their theories. The Impressionists, in rebellion, used form and colour to register their visual impressions; they belong to the age of science and state facts without comment. But every romantic or impressionist painter who happened to be an artist also used form and colour as means of expressing and provoking pure aesthetic emotion. It was not his fault if he flew in the face of party principles; he was an artist and he could not help it. Cezanne was not only a very great artist; he was what is almost as rare, a thoughtful one. So, in his later periods, he came to use form and colour solely as means of expressing and provoking those extraordinary emotions that arise from the contemplation of real or imagined form. His theory quarrels with no vital school of art that has ever existed. He merely sifted the grain from the chaff, the relevant from the irrelevant.