[Illustration:  CLAUDE MONET

CHURCH AT VERNON]

This fact of the substitution of character for beauty is the essential feature of the movement.  What is called Impressionism is—­let it not be forgotten—­a technique which can be applied to any subject.  Whether the subject be a virgin, or a labourer, it can be painted with divided tones, and certain living artists, like the symbolist Henri Martin, who has almost the ideas of a Pre-Raphaelite, have proved it by employing this technique for the rendering of religious or philosophic subjects.  But one can only understand the effort and the faults of the painters grouped around Manet, by constantly recalling to one’s mind their predeliction for character.  Before Manet a distinction was made between noble subjects, and others which were relegated to the domain of genre in which no great artist was admitted to exist by the School, the familiarity of their subjects barring from them this rank.  By the suppression of the nobleness inherent to the treated subject, the painter’s technical merit is one of the first things to be considered in giving him rank.  The Realist-Impressionists painted scenes in the ball-room, on the river, in the field, the street, the foundry, modern interiors, and found in the life of the humble immense scope for studying the gestures, the costumes, the expressions of the nineteenth century.

Their effort had its bearing upon the way of representing persons, upon what is called, in the studio language, the “mise en cadre.”  There, too, they overthrew the principles admitted by the School.  Manet, and especially Degas, have created in this respect a new style from which the whole art of realistic contemporary illustration is derived.  This style had been hitherto totally ignored, or the artists had shrunk from applying it.  It is a style which is founded upon the small painters of the eighteenth century, upon Saint-Aubin, Debucourt, Moreau, and, further back, upon Pater and the Dutchmen.  But this time, instead of confining this style to vignettes and very small dimensions, the Impressionists have boldly given it the dimensions and importance of big canvases.  They have no longer based the laws of composition, and consequently of style, upon the ideas relative to the subjects, but upon values and harmonies.  To take a summary example:  if the School composed a picture representing the death of Agamemnon, it did not fail to subordinate the whole composition to Agamemnon, then to Clytemnestra, then to the witnesses of the murder, graduating the moral and literary interest according to the different persons, and sacrificing to this interest the colouring and the realistic qualities of the scene.  The Realists composed by picking out first the strongest “value” of the picture, say a red dress, and then distributing the other values according to a harmonious progression of their tonalities.  “The principal person in a picture,” said