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 _à 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 _débonnaire_ 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 to occupy one's
self with values ideally, emotionally, personally. It is merely to
record facts. Certainly any impressionist rendering of the light and
shade and color relations of objects seems eloquent beside any
traditional and conventional rendering of them; but it is because each
object is so carefully observed, so truly painted, that its relation to
every other is spontaneously satisfactory; and this is a very different
thing from the result of truly pictorial rendering with its constructive
appeal, its sense of _ensemble_, its presentation of an idea by means of
the convergence and interdependence of objects focussed to a common and
central effect. To this impressionism is absolutely insensitive. It is
the acme of detachment, of indifference.
Turgénieff, according to Mr. George Moore, complained of Zola's Gervaise
Coupeau, that Zola explained how she felt, never what she thought.
"Qu'est que ça me fait si elle suait sous les bras, ou au milieu du
dos?" he asked, with most pertinent penetration. He is quite right.
Really we only care for facts when they explain truths. The desultory
agglomeration of never so definitely rendered details necessarily leaves
the civilized appreciation cold. What distinguishes the civilized from
the savage appreciation is the passion for order. The tendency to order,
said Sénancour, should form "an essential part of our inclinations, of
our instinct, like the tendencies to self-preservation and to
reproduction." The two latter tendencies the savage possesses as
completely as the civilized man, but he does not share the civilized
man's instinct for correlation. And in this sense, I think, a certain
savagery is justly to be ascribed to the impressionist. His productions
have many attractions and many merits--merits and attractions that the
traditional painting has not. But they are really only by a kind of
automatic inadvertence, pictures. They are not truly pictorial.
And a picture should be something more than even pictorial. To be
permanently attaching it should give at least a hint of the painter's
philosophy--his point of view, his attitude toward his material. In the
great pictures you can not only discover this attitude, but the attitude
of the painter toward life and the world in general. Everyone has as
distinct an idea of the philosophy of Raphael as of the qualities of his
designs. The impressionist not only does not show you what he thinks, he
does not even show you how he feels, except by betraying a fondness for
violets and diffused light, and by exhibiting the temper of the radical
and the rioter. The order of a blithe, idyllic landscape by Corot, of
one of Delacroix's pieces of concentric coloration, of an example of
Ingres's purity of outline, shows not only temperament, but the position
of the painter in regard to the whole intellectual world so far as he
touches it at all. What does a canvas of Claude Monet show in this
respect? It is more truthful but not less impersonal than a photograph.
Degas is the only other painter usually classed with the
impressionists, of whom this may not be said. But Degas is hardly an
impressionist at all. He is one of the most personal painters, if not
the most personal painter, of the day. He is as original as Puvis de
Chavannes. What allies him with the impressionists is his fondness for
fleeting aspects, his caring for nothing beyond aspect--for the look of
things and their transitory look. He is an enthusiastic admirer of
Ingres--who, one would say, is the antithesis of impressionism. He never
paints from nature. His studies are made with the utmost care, but they
are arranged, composed, combined by his own sense of what is
pictorial--by, at any rate, his own idea of the effects he wishes to
create. He cares absolutely nothing for what ordinarily we understand by
the real, the actual, so far as its reality is concerned; he sees
nothing else, to be sure, and is probably very sceptical about anything
but colors and shapes and their decorative arrangement; but he sees what
he likes in reality and follows this out with an inerrancy so
scrupulous, and even affectionate, as to convey the idea that in his
result he himself counts for almost nothing. This at least may be said
of him, that he shows what, given genius, can be got out of the
impressionist method artistically and practically employed to the end of
illustrating a personal point of view. A mere amateur can hardly
distinguish between a Caillebotte and a Sisley, for example, but
everyone identifies a Degas as immediately and as certainly as he does a
Whistler. His work is perfectly sincere and admirably intelligent. It
has neither the pose nor the irresponsibility of the impressionists. His
artistic apotheosis of the ballet-girl is merely the result of his happy
discovery of something delightfully, and in a very true sense naturally,
decorative in material that is in the highest degree artificial. His
impulse is as genuine and spontaneous as if the substance upon which it
is exercised were not the acme of the exotic, and already arranged with
the most elaborate conventionality. Nothing indeed could be more opposed
to the elementary crudity of impressionism than his distinction and
refinement, which may be said to be carried to a really _fin de siècle_
degree.