to materiality, confuses processes with meanings, and considers form as the simple result of psychophysical responses to objective stimuli. The "aesthetic emotion"—in truth, only a popular hack, no psychologist having succeeded in separating it from other emotions—serves as the basis of a treatise which presents the history of art as nothing more or less than mechanical expansion. Never philosophical, his conception of the beautiful is much too meagre to permit of any penetration into the intimate connexion between pigment and the subjective antecedents of human experience, and to recognize how deeply and inextricably bound to one's whole nature are those impulses which take form in the conventions of poetry, painting, sculpture, and the rest of the arts. To believe that a mechanical evolution in the technique of art is of any great aesthetic importance is an illusion arising from a profound misunderstanding of the history of the subject.
Aesthetics is a study of the relationship between the theoretic spirit and form, both of the building of form and the responses to it; the means by which form is delineated are of small consideration compared with the psychological states involved in construction and appreciation. All questions of drawing, colour, line, mass, et cetera, apart from the meaning they convey when combined into expressive symbols, are essentially mechanical; indeed they are as remote from true aesthetics as would be a knowledge of geology and botany in the analysis of the emotional appeal of a beautiful landscape. Technical manipulation, even among artists, has been at all times of far less concern than Mr Wright concedes. Except for the noisy mechanical flurry succeeding Cézanne, painters have from the beginning insisted on the pre-eminence of their spiritual message; they have been composers, not of lines and planes, but of ideas—and of ideas having but one inevitable medium of externalization. The visible world with its enormous array of suggestive material, and the memory with its accumulation of historical, practical, and emotional experiences, are the true motives of plastic expression.
While the artist is of necessity interested in procedure, that interest is always subordinate, in genuine creative activity, to conception. We find to-day among radical painters a growing preoccupation with ideas; and even from the first appearance of Modernism the main quarrel with the academy has been one of content,
