In the new manifestation which we now consider, where expression of sentiment is given predominance, the artist, interpreter of the passions, sentiments, weaknesses and vices as well as of the virtues and sympathies of humanity, must, in order to interest or chasten, show to it its own image, which reflection will be most frequently not an ideal of perfection but a type of suffering and vice, of weakness and depravity.  A work will be successful in proportion as the chisel shall be most indefatigable in putting in relief the virtue or the vice which characterizes the subject.  The greatest artist shall be he who renders most striking the characteristic predominance, whatever it may be, of the type created or interpreted.  To sum up:  Art is proportional to the faculties of the artist, and the work is the result of an application of these faculties to some special manifestation of the human ego.

Impressionalism, as in the other arts, should be considered in two aspects:  the impression of the artist and that of the public or observer.  The question then arises, what kind of a public should be impressed that the artist may merit a place in the higher ranks of aesthetics?  While we have recognized that judgments in questions of art are the result of a certain sympathy existing between artist and observer, we have decided also that in considering such a question, all observers cannot be considered equal.  In sculpture as in literature, where appreciators are possibly more numerous, we must admit that knowledge and capability or even sincerity are rarely of any weight in the balance of the grand juries of history or in the verdicts of contemporaries.  The ignorant multitude sanction the grossest works because these only come within their understanding.  Encouraged by the applause of numbers and by the lack of restraint which wins applause, artists descend the rounds of the ladder of progress which step by step has marked the ascent of the great schools and the great masters, and the result inevitably must be the return to mere sketches in sculpture, and painting will diminish to imagery.  This end is quickly and readily reached, so easy and so fatal is the descent in these paths of decadence.

“All styles are good except the tedious,” a well-known critic has said.  Pursuing the import of this thought, we are led to the speedy conclusion that the null should never enter into competition.  Nothing better than that the condition of priority should exist between diverse styles and opposite schools; but why strive to institute comparison between a synthetic idea and the absence of synthesis and idea, between certain proportions and harmony and the absence of proportion and harmony, between a style and the absence of style?  Whatever the subject and whatever the mode of treating it, the intelligence of the artist should always be visible in his work.