tes or the Impressionists were
they conscious of any social or universal ideals that demanded
expression. The aesthetes had a doctrine; the Impressionists had a method
and a technic. The Post-Impressionists had nothing, and were driven to
the attempt at pure self-expression--to the exaltation of the great god
Whim. They had no training, they recognized no traditions, they spoke to
no public. Each was to express, as he thought best, whatever he happened
to feel or to think, and to invent, as he went along, the language in
which he should express it. I think some of these men had the elements
of genius in them and might have done good work; but their task was a
heart-breaking and a hopeless one. An art cannot be improvised, and an
artist must have some other guide than unregulated emotion. The path
they entered upon had been immemorially marked "no passing"; for many of
them the end of it was suicide or the madhouse.

But whatever the aberrations of these, the true
Post-Impressionists--whatever the ugliness, the eccentricity, or the
moral dinginess into which they were betrayed--I believe them to have
been, in the main, honest if unbalanced and ill-regulated minds.
Whatever their errors, they paid the price of them in poverty, in
neglect, in death. With those who pretend to be their descendants to-day
the case is different; they are not paying for their eccentricity or
their madness, they are making it pay.

The enormous engine of modern publicity has been discovered by these
men. They have learned to advertise, and they have found that morbidity,
eccentricity, indecency, extremes of every kind and of any degree are
capital advertisement. If one cannot create a sound and living art, one
can at least make something odd enough to be talked about; if one cannot
achieve enduring fame, one may make sure of a flaming notoriety. And, as
a money-maker, present notoriety is worth more than future fame, for the
speculative dealer is at hand. His interest is in "quick returns" and
he has no wish to wait until you are famous--or dead--before he can sell
anything you do. His process is to buy anything he thinks he can "boom,"
to "boom" it as furiously as possible, and to sell it before the "boom"
collapses. Then he will exploit something else, and there's the rub.
Once you have entered this mad race for notoriety, there is no drawing
out of it. The same sensation will not attract attention a second time;
you must be novel at any cost