ome kind of reality, or it is a
monstrosity; he is obliged to refer to the external world for his
symbols. The impressionist, who concerns himself with the play of
light over surfaces in nature, is seeking for truth, and he cares to
paint at all because that play of light, seemingly so momentary and
so merely sensuous, has a value for his spirit of which he may or
may not be wholly conscious; and these shifting effects are the
realization of his ideal. Unwitting at the moment of contact itself of
the significance that afterwards is to flow articulately from his work,
the artist, in the presence of his object, knows only that he is
impelled to render it. As faithfully as possible he tries to record what
he sees, conscious simply that what he sees gives him delight. His
vision wakens his feeling, and then by reaction his feeling
determines his vision, controlling and directing his selection of the
details of aspect. When Velasquez, engaged on a portrait of the king,
saw the maids of honor graciously attending on the little princess, he
did not set about producing a _picture,_ as an end in itself. In the
relation of these figures to one another and to the background of the
deep and high-vaulted chamber in which they were standing, each
object and plane of distance receiving its just amount of light and
fusing in the unity of total impression, were revealed to him the
wonder and the mystery of nature's magic of light. This is what he
tried to render. His revelation of natural truth, wrung from nature's
inmost latencies and shown to us triumphantly, becomes a thing of
beauty.

So the differences among the various "schools" in art are after all
largely differences of emphasis. The choice of subject or motive, the
angle from which it is viewed, and the method of handling, all are
determined by the artist's kind of interest; and that interest results
from what the man is essentially by inheritance and individual
character, and what he is moulded into by environment, training, and
experience. It may happen that the external object imposes itself in
its integrity upon the artist's mind and temperament, and he tries to
express it, colored inevitably by his feeling toward it, in all
faithfulness to the feet as he sees it. Millet said, "I should never paint
anything that was not the result of an impression received from the
aspect of nature, whether in landscape or figures." Millet painted
what he saw, but he painted it as only he