MacColl has pointed out the weakness of the scientific side of impressionism.  Its values are strictly aesthetic; attempts to paint on a purely scientific basis have proved both monotonous and ludicrous.  The experiments of the neo-impressionists (the 1885 group), of Signac, Seurat, were not very convincing.  Van Rhysselberge, one of the few painters to-day who practise pointillisme, or the system of dots, is a gifted artist; so is Anquetin.  The feminine group is headed by the name of Berthe Morisot (the wife of Eugene Manet, a brother of Edouard and the great granddaughter of Fragonard), a pupil of Manet, the most individual woman painter that ever lived; and Mary Cassatt, a pupil of Degas, though more closely allied to the open-air school in her methods.  Miss Cassatt possesses a distinguished talent.  As a school impressionism has run down to a thin rill in a waste of sand.  It is more technical than personal, and while it was lucky to have such an exponent as Claude Monet, there is every reason to believe that Monet’s impressionism is largely the result of a peculiar penetrating vision.  He has been imitated, and Maufra and Moret are carrying on his tradition—­yet there is but one Monet.

We know that the spectral palette is a mild delusion and sometimes a dangerous snare, that impressionism is in the remotest analysis but a new convention supplanting an old.  Painters will never go back to the muddy palette of the past.  The trick has been turned.  The egg of Columbus has been once more stood on end.  Claude Monet has taught us the “innocence of the eye,” has shown us how to paint air that circulates, water that sparkles.  The sun was the centre of the impressionistic attack, the “splendid, silent sun.”  A higher pitch in key colour has been attained, shadows have been endowed with vital hues. (And Leonardo da Vinci, wonderful landscapist, centuries ago wrote learnedly of coloured shadows; every new discovery is only a rediscovery.) The “dim, religious light” of the studio has been banished; the average palette is lighter, is more brilliant.  And Rembrandt is still worshipped; Raphael is still on his pedestal, and the millionaire on the street continues to buy Bouguereau.  The amateur who honestly wishes to purge his vision of encrusted painted prejudices we warn not to go too close to an impressionistic canvas—­any more than he would go near a red-hot stove or a keg of gunpowder.  And let him forget those toothsome critical terms, decomposition, recomposition.  His eyes, if permitted, will act for themselves; there is no denying that the principles of impressionism soundly applied, especially to landscape, catch the fleeting, many-hued charm of nature.  It is a system of coloured stenography—­in the hands of a master.  Woe betide the fumbler!

II — RENOIR