Cezanne, Van Gogh, or Gauguin completed the magic journey. But if they did not refine away the solids in their canvases and set them going as fluid motion, if they put down forms recognizable as houses, men, trees, and so on, they certainly exhibited such forms undergoing a process of melting. In Van Gogh’s canvases the forms are simply being melted by the fierce internal intensity to which the artist is subjecting them. Van Gogh, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, shows us known forms in the act of being converted into their original fluid motion. And it is for this reason, I think, Van Gogh’s pictures produce a greater creative effect upon the spectator than any merely representative forms of art. We experience in them a rush of liberated energy due to the change from solidity to fluidity. So much for the new conception of the origin and nature of Art. With regard to the principles by which Art moves towards its ultimate effect, I believe they are analogous to those by which an unseen agency assumes visibility in natural forms. There is the same order, intelligibility, and coherence throughout. Corresponding to the invariable order of growth and progression in a plant as represented by the seed (enclosing the life and unifying principle) stem, branches, leaves and fruit, is the order of ascent, or perhaps it should be descent, by which Art takes concrete form. First there is the initial flow, then the root-point answering to the seed or unifying principle, then follow in turn, lines, planes, and solids. The fruit and the solids appear to be the culmination of the initial flow, but really they contain a potential power of growth in a realizable fluid motion. This abstract motion has ever since the start been descending and slackening into solid motion, and its forms have become more and more concrete as they attained actuality. Behind these actual forms, it is clear, there is the potentiality of further movement and growth which in our limited state of intelligence we conceive of as realisable only on the original lines. If there is an infinite growth and development inherent in actual forms very few persons are aware of it. Indeed most persons are aware only of particular growth. To them growth begins with the seed and stops with the fruit or its art expression as fruit, and the only form of continuation is to be found in repetition. The old process must be repeated from seed to fruit. According to this view the phenomena of growth as expressed by art-forms is manifested in a succession of parallel movements and not in one continuous and ever-expanding movement. Generally speaking, things are transferred to canvas as they appear, particular solids, not infinite fluids as they are. If they have a life principle in them it is carefully concealed, for they suggest no power of infinite growth. It would seem indeed as though art-expression, during civilized times, has reached a deadlock. For it is noticeable