For all art is an exchange of gain against loss—­you cannot have Sargent’s truth of impression and Titian’s truth of emotion in the same picture, nor Michelangelo’s beauty of structure with Botticelli’s beauty of line.  To be a successful artist is to know what you want and to get it at any necessary sacrifice, though the greatest artists maintain a noble balance and sacrifice no more than is necessary.  And if a painter of to-day is like-minded with these older masters he will have to express himself much in their manner.  He will have to make, with his eyes open, the sacrifices which they made, more or less unconsciously, and to deny a whole range of truths with which his fellows are occupied that he may express clearly and forcibly the few truths which he has chosen.

All truths are good, and all ways of painting are legitimate that are necessary to the expression of any truth.  I am not here concerned to show that one way is better than another or one set of truths more important than another set of truths.  For the present I am desirous only of showing why there is more than one way—­of explaining the necessity of different methods for the expression of different individualities and different ways of envisaging nature and art.  But a little while ago it was the modern or impressionistic manner that needed explanation.  It was new, it was revolutionary, and it was misunderstood and disliked.  A generation of critics has been busy in explaining it, a generation of artists has been busy in practising it, and now the balance has turned the other way.  The pressure of conformity is upon the other side, and it is the older methods that need justification and explanation.  The prejudices of the workers and the writers have gradually and naturally become the prejudices of at least a part of the public, and it has become necessary to show that the small minority of artists who still follow the old roads do so not from ignorance or stupidity or a stolid conservatism, still less from mere wilful caprice, but from necessity, because those roads are the only ones that can lead them where they wish to go.  No more magnificent demonstration of the qualities possible to the purely modern methods of painting has been made than this brilliant little picture of Sargent’s.  All the more is it a demonstration of the qualities impossible to these methods.  If such qualities have any permanent value and interest for the modern world it is a gain for art that some painters should try to keep alive the methods that render possible their attainment.

VI

THE AMERICAN SCHOOL

In the catalogues of our museums you may find entries like this:  “John Smith, American school; The Empty Jug” or what-not.  In such entries little more than a bare statement of nationality is intended.  John Smith is an American, by birth or adoption; that is all that the statement is meant to convey.  But the question occurs:  Have we an American school in a more specific sense than this?  Have we a body of painters with certain traits in common and certain differences from the painters of other countries?  Has our production in painting sufficient homogeneity and sufficient national and local accent to entitle it to the name of American school in the sense in which there is, undoubtedly, a French school and an English school?