as the great Impressionists, Renoir, Degas, Manet, knew (two of them happily know it still) the moment they left off arguing and bolted the studio door on that brilliant theorist, Claude Monet.  Some of them, to be sure, turned out polychromatic charts of desolating dullness—­Monet towards the end, for instance.  The Neo-Impressionists—­Seurat, Signac, and Cross—­have produced little else.  And any Impressionist, under the influence of Monet and Watteau, was capable of making a poor, soft, formless thing.  But more often the Impressionist masters, in their fantastic and quite unsuccessful pursuit of scientific truth, created works of art tolerable in design and glorious in colour.  Of course this oasis in the mid-century desert delighted the odd people who cared about art; they pretended at first to be absorbed in the scientific accuracy of the thing, but before long they realised that they were deceiving themselves, and gave up the pretence.  For they saw very clearly that these pictures differed most profoundly from the anecdotic triumphs of Victorian workshops, not in their respectful attention to scientific theory, but in the fact that, though they made little or no appeal to the interests of ordinary life, they provoked a far more potent and profound emotion.  Scientific theories notwithstanding, the Impressionists provoked that emotion which all great art provokes—­an emotion in the existence of which the bulk of Victorian artists and critics were, for obvious reasons, unable to believe.  The virtue of these Impressionist pictures, whatever it might be, depended on no reference to the outside world.  What could it be?  “Sheer beauty,” said the enchanted spectators.  They were not far wrong.

That beauty is the one essential quality in a work of art is a doctrine that has been too insistently associated with the name of Whistler, who is neither its first nor its last, nor its most capable, exponent—­but only of his age the most conspicuous.  To read Whistler’s Ten o’Clock will do no one any harm, or much good.  It is neither very brilliant nor at all profound, but it is in the right direction.  Whistler is not to be compared with the great controversialists any more than he is to be compared with the great artists.  To set The Gentle Art beside The Dissertation on the Letters of Phalaris, Gibbon’s Vindication, or the polemics of Voltaire, would be as unjust as to hang “Cremorne Gardens” in the Arena Chapel.  Whistler was not even cock of the Late Victorian walk; both Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw were his masters in the art of controversy.  But amongst Londoners of the “eighties” he is a bright figure, as much alone almost in his knowledge of what art is, as in his power of creating it:  and it is this that gives a peculiar point and poignance to all his quips and quarrels.  There is dignity in his impudence.  He is using his rather obvious cleverness to fight for something dearer than vanity.  He is a lonely artist, standing up and hitting below