I am more and more thoroughly convinced that the theory of Delsarte, fatal to simplisme, is the true theory of art.  What can be more simpliste than impressionalism when viewed as a school?  It considers no law or science, disregards entirely analysis and logic, the Good and the Beautiful; it is given over to sensation; vague impressions which are, whatever may be said to the contrary, only the inferior part of man’s faculties, indispensable surely, but that which we have in common with the animals and little children; very interesting to observe among animals, a charming grace in children, but a most unimportant factor in adult existence, particularly in the artist’s life, unless it be governed by the intellect and subject to the sanction of feeling.

Application of the Law to Painting.

If any art should be given over to impressionalism it seems as if it should be painting.  To see and to transmit what is seen,—­is not this the true office of the painter, his undoubted mission?  Yes, on condition that the artist has the requisites for seeing correctly!  And if he rises to composition, he must also be endowed with a creative intellect, with a portion of that mental power which will permit him to embrace a conception synthetically, and to cooerdinate its parts.

Among the impressionalists of our time, there are assuredly painters of talent; but what talent they possess is, as it were, against their will:  the influence of tradition, the weight of the medium in which they live unconsciously restrain them.  Then, it must be confessed, this impressionability of the artist has its intrinsic merits, if it is kept to its place and degree; but it must be regarded as certain, that if the simpliste artist makes himself distinct in his work, it is because he contains within himself more of the requisites for what he undertakes, and because, without his having summoned them, the faculties of the understanding and the aesthetic sense have come to his aid.

If Delsarte admitted the precept that “everything is perceived in the manner of the perceiver,” he, of course, did not admit that every perceiver should make his own law:  his conception of the aesthetic trilogy would never have permitted him to open this Babel for the vanity of ignorance.

To finish with simplisme or naturalism, let us say that, carried to its utmost extreme, it becomes a fixed idea, a monomania; has not impressionalism attained to this even in the choice of colors?  It has been said of certain painters that they had only to upset their palette on the canvas to compose their pictures!  Yet this varicolored chaos is not the characteristic of the school On the contrary, certain favorite colors prevail; do not green and violet rule almost exclusively in some of the most striking pictures from impressionalist brushes?

There are moments when we ask whether the impressionalists and their adherents are not obeying an impulse to contradict rather than a serious conviction.  In either case, it is time for many of them to furnish proofs—­that is to say, works,—­in lack of the reasons which they have not even offered.