The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilisation; man will have to rise against it sooner or later....  Capital, unpaid labour, wage-slaves, and all the rest—­stuff....  Look at these plates; they were painted by machinery; they are abominable.  Look at them.  In old times plates were painted by the hand, and the supply was necessarily limited to the demand, and a china in which there was always something more or less pretty, was turned out; but now thousands, millions of plates are made more than we want, and there is a commercial crisis; the thing is inevitable.  I say the great and the reasonable revolution will be when mankind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and restores the handicrafts.

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Goncourt is not an artist, notwithstanding all his affectation and outcries; he is not an artist. Il me fait l’effet of an old woman shrieking after immortality and striving to beat down some fragment of it with a broom.  Once it was a duet, now it is a solo.  They wrote novels, history, plays, they collected bric-a-brac—­they wrote about their bric-a-brac; they painted in water-colours, they etched—­they wrote about their water-colours and etchings; they have made a will settling that the bric-a-brac is to be sold at their death, and the proceeds applied to founding a prize for the best essay or novel, I forget which it is.  They wrote about the prize they are going to found; they kept a diary, they wrote down everything they heard, felt, or saw, radotage de vieille femme; nothing must escape, not the slightest word; it might be that very word that might confer on them immortality; everything they heard, or said, must be of value, of inestimable value.  A real artist does not trouble himself about immortality, about everything he hears, feels, and says; he treats ideas and sensations as so much clay wherewith to create.

And then the famous collaboration; how it was talked about, written about, prayed about; and when Jules died, what a subject for talk for articles; it all went into pot.  Hugo’s vanity was Titanic, Goncourt’s is puerile.

And Daudet?

Oh, Daudet, c’est de la bouillabaisse.

* * * * *

Whistler, of all artists, is the least impressionist; the idea people have of his being an impressionist only proves once again the absolute inability of the public to understand the merits or the demerits of artistic work.  Whistler’s art is absolutely classical; he thinks of nature, but he does not see nature; he is guided by his mind, and not by his eyes; and the best of it is he says so.  Oh, he knows it well enough!  Any one who knows him must have heard him say, “Painting is absolutely scientific; it is an exact science.”  And his work is in accord with his theory; he risks nothing, all is brought down, arranged, balanced, and made one,—­a