Somewhat unrefined, in comparison with his lofty and simple claim to be believed on a suggestion, is the commoner painter’s production of his credentials, his appeal to the sanctions of ordinary experience, his self-defence against the suspicion of making irresponsible mysteries in art.  “You can see for yourself,” the lesser man seems to say to the world, “thus things are, and I render them in such manner that your intelligence may be satisfied.”  This is an appeal to average experience—­at the best the cumulative experience; and with the average, or with the sum, art cannot deal without derogation.  The Spaniard seems to say:  “Thus things are in my pictorial sight.  Trust me, I apprehend them so.”  We are not excluded from his counsels, but we are asked to attribute a certain authority to him, master of the craft as he is, master of that art of seeing pictorially which is the beginning and not far from the end—­not far short of the whole—­of the art of painting.  So little indeed are we shut out from the mysteries of a great Impressionist’s impression that Velasquez requires us to be in some degree his colleagues.  Thus may each of us to whom he appeals take praise from the praised:  he leaves my educated eyes to do a little of the work.  He respects my responsibility no less—­though he respects it less explicitly—­than I do his.  What he allows me would not be granted by a meaner master.  If he does not hold himself bound to prove his own truth, he returns thanks for my trust.  It is as though he used his countrymen’s courteous hyperbole and called his house my own.  In a sense of the most noble hostship he does me the honours of his picture.

Because Impressionism with all its extreme—­let us hope its ultimate—­derivatives is so free, therefore is it doubly bound.  Because there is none to arraign it, it is a thousand times responsible.  To undertake this art for the sake of its privileges without confessing its obligations—­or at least without confessing them up to the point of honour—­is to take a vulgar freedom:  to see immunities precisely where there are duties, and an advantage where there is a bond.  A very mob of men have taken Impressionism upon themselves, in several forms and under a succession of names, in this our later day.  It is against all probabilities that more than a few among these have within them the point of honour.  In their galleries we are beset with a dim distrust.  And to distrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted.  How many of these landscape-painters, deliberately rash, are painting the truth of their own impressions?  An ethical question as to loyalty is easily answered; truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the intelligence of the common conscience, not hard to divide.  But when the dubium concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure that their sensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their delicate equipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension,