Since Cézanne

With anyone who concludes that this preliminary essay is merely to justify the rather appetizing title of my book I shall be at no pains to quarrel. If privately I think it does more, publicly I shall not avow it. Historically and critically, I admit, the thing is as slight as a sketch contained in five-and-thirty pages must be, and certainly it adds nothing to what I have said, in the essays to which it stands preface, on æsthetic theory. The function it is meant to perform—no very considerable one perhaps—is to justify not so much the title as the shape of my book, giving, in the process, a rough sketch of the period with certain aspects of which I am to deal. That the shape needs justification is attributable to the fact that though all, or nearly all, the component articles were written with a view to making one volume, I was conscious, while I wrote them, of dealing with two subjects. Sometimes I was discussing current ideas, and questions arising out of a theory of art; at others I was trying to give some account of the leading painters of the contemporary movement. Sometimes I was writing of Theory, sometimes of Practice. By means of this preface I hope to show why, at the moment, these two, far from being distinct, are inseparable.