ious
attention of the true painter. To others he must remain a little
unsatisfactory, because he is not only not a dreamer, but because he
does nothing with his material except to show it as it is--a great
service surely, but largely excluding the exercise of that architectonic
faculty, personally directed, which is the very life of every truly
aesthetic production.

VII

In fine, the impressionist has his own conventions; no school can escape
them, from the very nature of the case and the definition of the term.
The conventions of the impressionists, indeed, are particularly salient.
Can anyone doubt it who sees an exhibition of their works? In the same
number of classic, or romantic, or merely realistic pictures, is there
anything quite equalling the monotony that strikes one in a display of
canvasses by Claude Monet and his fellows and followers? But the defect
of impressionism is not mainly its technical conventionality. It is, as
I think everyone except its thick-and-thin advocates must feel, that
pursued _a outrance_ it lacks a seriousness commensurate with its
claims--that it exhibits indeed a kind of undertone of frivolity that is
all the nearer to the absolutely comic for the earnestness, so to speak,
of its unconsciousness. The reason is, partly no doubt, to be ascribed
to its _debonnaire_ self-satisfaction, its disposition to "lightly run
amuck at an august thing," the traditions of centuries namely, to its
bumptiousness, in a word. But chiefly, I think, the reason is to be
found in its lack of anything properly to be called a philosophy. This
is surely a fatal flaw in any system, because it involves a
contradiction in terms; and to say that to have no philosophy is the
philosophy of the impressionists, is merely a word-juggling bit of
question-begging. A theory of technic is not a philosophy, however
systematic it may be. It is a mechanical, not an intellectual, point of
view. It is not a way of looking at things, but of rendering them. It
expresses no idea and sees no relations; its claims on one's interest
are exhausted when once its right to its method is admitted. The remark
once made of a typically literal person--that he cared so much for facts
that he disliked to think they had any relations--is intimately
applicable to the whole impressionist school. Technically, of course,
the impressionist's relations are extremely just--not exquisite, but
exquisitely just. But merely to get just values is not