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Updated: June 30, 2025
The sofa pillows had been rearranged so that the effect of their grouping was less bizarre than that favored by the Western women; a horrid little Buddhist idol with its eyes fixed on its abdomen, had been chastely hidden behind a Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the scrutiny of polite eyes; and on the table where Miss Prudence did work in water colors, after the fashion of the impressionists, lay a prim and impossible composition representing a moss-rose and a number of heartsease, colored with that caution which modest spinster artists instinctively exercise.
It is strange how, in all serious discussion, to the confounding of some current ideas of criticism, we are thrown back, inevitably, on this concept of excellence! The most ardent of impressionists wakes up sooner or later to the idea that he has been talking values all his life. The excellences of literature!
It was he who first made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently been accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must admit that I could not make head or tail of them. Without much searching, I found an apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the Lion de Belfort.
The room was full when Arthur Burdon entered, but Margaret had kept him an empty seat between herself and Miss Boyd. Everyone was speaking at once, in French, at the top of his voice, and a furious argument was proceeding on the merit of the later Impressionists. Arthur sat down, and was hurriedly introduced to a lanky youth, who sat on the other side of Margaret.
He drew her, made songs for her, and devised French charades to act with her; he even went so far as to compare her with enthusiasm to the latest and most wonderful "Salome" just exhibited in the Salon by the latest and most wonderful of the impressionists. But Lady Madeleine fortunately had not seen the picture.
Now Impressionists have told us things as to their impressions as to the effect of things upon the temperament of this man and upon the mood of that which should not be asserted except on the artistic point of honour. The majority can tell ordinary truth, but should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary.
Duerer and the Greeks are at one with Michael Angelo and Rembrandt in condemning by their practice all purely mechanical application of ideas or methods to the production of works of creative art, such as is exemplified by artists of more limited aims and powers; by academical practitioners, by theoretical scientists calling themselves impressionists, luminarists, naturalists, or any other name.
He knew a century before the modern impressionists the knack of juxtaposition, of opposition, of tonal division; his science was profound. He must have studied Watteau and the Dutchmen closely. Diderot was amazed to find that his surpassing whites were neither black nor white, but a neuter but by a subtle transposition of tones looked white.
The Impressionists had been occupied with other problems, they had painted man admirably, but they had troubled themselves as little as the English portrait painters of the eighteenth century with the intention of his soul. "But when you try to get that you become literary," said Lawson, interrupting. "Let me paint the man like Manet, and the intention of his soul can go to the devil."
Many of the critics, at one period, charged the professed admirers of Wagner with being impostors or imbeciles; later on, anyone who professed to like the pictures of Whistler or Rossetti or Burne-Jones, or of any of the Impressionists, was accused of affectation. The same kind of thing happened in the case of Maeterlinck. Many other instances might be cited. It is a curious form of attack.
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