Not that it is without its faults!  It has been said, to belittle it, that it only had the value of an interesting attempt, having only been able to indicate some excellent intentions, without creating anything perfect.  This is inexact.  It is absolutely evident, that Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas have signed some masterpieces which did not lose by comparison with those in the Louvre, and the same might even be said of their less illustrious friends.  But it is also evident that the time spent on research as well as on agitation and enervating controversies pursued during twenty-five years, has been taken from men who could otherwise have done better still.  There has been a disparity between Realism and the technique of Impressionism.  Its realistic origin has sometimes made it vulgar.  It has often treated indifferent subjects in a grand style, and it has too easily beheld life from the anecdotal side.  It has lacked psychologic synthesis (if we except Degas).  It has too willingly denied all that exists hidden under the apparent reality of the universe and has affected to separate painting from the ideologic faculties which rule over all art.  Hatred of academic allegory, defiance of symbolism, abstraction and romantic scenes, has led it to refuse to occupy itself with a whole order of ideas, and it has had the tendency of making the painter beyond all a workman.  It was necessary at the moment of its arrival, but it is no longer necessary now, and the painters understand this themselves.  Finally it has too often been superficial even in obtaining effects; it has given way to the wish to surprise the eyes, of playing with tones merely for love of cleverness.  It often causes one regret to see symphonies of magnificent colour wasted here in pictures of boating men; and there, in pictures of cafe corners; and we have arrived at a degree of complex intellectuality which is no longer satisfied with these rudimentary themes.  It has indulged in useless exaggerations, faults of composition and of harmony, and all this cannot be denied.

But it still remains fascinating and splendid for its gifts which will always rouse enthusiasm:  freedom, impetuousness, youth, brilliancy, fervour, the joy of painting and the passion for beautiful light.  It is, on the whole, the greatest pictorial movement that France has beheld since Delacroix, and it brings to a finish gloriously the nineteenth century, inaugurating the present.  It has accomplished the great deed of having brought us again into the presence of our true national lineage, far more so than Romanticism, which was mixed with foreign elements.  We have here painting of a kind which could only have been conceived in France, and we have to go right back to Watteau in order to receive again the same impression.  Impressionism has brought us an almost unhoped-for renaissance, and this constitutes its most undeniable claim upon the gratitude of the race.