cial priest.
The Academy has shown itself hostile to a degree in this quarrel. It has
excluded the Impressionists from the Salons, from awards, from official
purchases. Only quite recently the acceptance of the Caillebotte
bequest to the Luxembourg Gallery gave rise to a storm of indignation
among the official painters. I shall, in the course of this book, enter
upon the value of these attacks. Meanwhile I can only say how
regrettable this obstinacy appears to me and will appear to every free
spirit. It is unworthy even of an ardent conviction to condemn a whole
group of artists _en bloc_ as fools, enemies of beauty, or as tricksters
anxious to degrade the art of their nation, when these artists worked
during forty years towards the same goal, without getting any reward for
their effort, but poverty and derision. It is now about ten years since
Impressionism has taken root, since its followers can sell their
canvases, and since they are admired and praised by a solid and
ever-growing section of the public. The hour has therefore arrived,
calmly to consider a movement which has imposed itself upon the history
of French art from 1860 to 1900 with extreme energy, to leave
dithyrambics as well as polemics, and to speak of it with a view to
exactness. The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of
beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art,
and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon
itself as the guardian of the national tradition, because it exercises
an hierarchic authority over the _Ecole de Rome_, the _Salons_, and the
_Ecole des Beaux Arts_. All the same, its ideals are of very mixed
origin and very little French. Its principles are the same by which the
academic art of nearly all the official schools of Europe is governed.
This mythological and allegorical art, guided by dogmas and formulas
which are imposed upon all pupils regardless of their temperament, is
far more international than national. To an impartial critic this
statement will show in an even more curious light the excommunication
jealously issued by the academic painters against French artists, who,
far from revolting in an absurd spirit of _parti-pris_ against the
genius of their race, are perhaps more sincerely attached to it than
their persecutors. Why should a group of men deliberately choose to
paint mad, illogical, bad pictures, and reap a harvest of public
derision, poverty and sterilit