Anyone who cares more for a theory than for the truth is at liberty to say that the art of the Impressionists, with their absurd notions about scientific representation, is a lovely fungus growing very naturally on the ruins of the Christian slope.  The same can hardly be said about Whistler, who was definitely in revolt against the theory of his age.  For we must never forget that accurate representation of what the grocer thinks he sees was the central dogma of Victorian art.  It is the general acceptance of this view—­that the accurate imitation of objects is an essential quality in a work of art—­and the general inability to create, or even to recognise, aesthetic qualities, that mark the nineteenth century as the end of a slope.  Except stray artists and odd amateurs, and you may say that in the middle of the nineteenth century art had ceased to exist.  That is the importance of the official and academic art of that age:  it shows us that we have touched bottom.  It has the importance of an historical document.  In the eighteenth century there was still a tradition of art.  Every official and academic painter, even at the end of the eighteenth century, whose name was known to the cultivated public, whose works were patronised by collectors, knew perfectly well that the end of art was not imitation, that forms must have some aesthetic significance.  Their successors in the nineteenth century did not.  Even the tradition was dead.  That means that generally and officially art was dead.  We have seen it die.  The Royal Academy and the Salon have been made to serve their useful, historical purpose.  We need say no more about them.  Whether those definitely artistic cliques of the nineteenth century, the men who made form a means to aesthetic emotion and not a means of stating facts and conveying ideas, the Impressionists and the Aesthetes, Manet and Renoir, Whistler and Conder, &c. &c., are to be regarded as accidental flowers blossoming on a grave or as portents of a new age, will depend upon the temperament of him who regards them.

But a sketch of the Christian slope may well end with the Impressionists, for Impressionist theory is a blind alley.  Its only logical development would be an art-machine—­a machine for establishing values correctly, and determining what the eye sees scientifically, thereby making the production of art a mechanical certainty.  Such a machine, I am told, was invented by an Englishman.  Now if the praying-machine be admittedly the last shift of senile religion, the value-finding machine may fairly be taken for the psychopomp of art.  Art has passed from the primitive creation of significant form to the highly civilised statement of scientific fact.  I think the machine, which is the intelligent and respectable end, should be preserved, if still it exists, at South Kensington or in the Louvre, along with the earlier monuments of the Christian slope.  As for that uninteresting and disreputable end, official nineteenth-century art, it can be studied in a hundred public galleries and in annual exhibitions all over the world.  It is the mouldy and therefore the obvious end.  The spirit that came to birth with the triumph of art over Graeco-Roman realism dies with the ousting of art by the picture of commerce.