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The Impressionism that dominated the pictorial art of the later years of the nineteenth century was largely a modified and very delicate imitation.  Breaking with conventions as to how things are supposed to be—­conventions mainly based not on seeing but on knowing or imagining—­the Impressionist insists on purging his vision from knowledge, and representing things not as they are but as they really look.  He imitates Nature not as a whole, but as she presents herself to his eyes.  It was a most needful and valuable purgation, since painting is the art proper of the eye.  But, when the new effects of the world as simply seen, the new material of light and shadow and tone, had been to some extent—­never completely—­mastered, there was inevitable reaction.  Up sprang Post-Impressionists and Futurists.  They will not gladly be classed together, but both have this in common—­they are Expressionists, not Impressionists, not Imitators.

The Expressionists, no matter by what name they call themselves, have one criterion.  They believe that art is not the copying or idealizing of Nature, or of any aspect of Nature, but the expression and communication of the artist’s emotion.  We can see that, between them and the Imitationists, the Impressionists form a delicate bridge.  They, too, focus their attention on the artist rather than the object, only it is on the artist’s particular vision, his impression, what he actually sees, not on his emotion, what he feels.

Modern life is not simple—­cannot be simple—­ought not to be; it is not for nothing that we are heirs to the ages.  Therefore the art that utters and expresses our emotion towards modern life cannot be simple; and, moreover, it must before all things embody not only that living tangle which is felt by the Futurists as so real, but it must purge and order it, by complexities of tone and rhythm hitherto unattempted.  One art, beyond all others, has blossomed into real, spontaneous, unconscious life to-day, and that is Music; the other arts stand round arrayed, half paralyzed, with drooping, empty hands.  The nineteenth century saw vast developments in an art that could express abstract, unlocalized, unpersonified feelings more completely than painting or poetry, the art of Music.

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As a modern critic[57] has well observed:  “In tone and rhythm music has a notation for every kind and degree of action and passion, presenting abstract moulds of its excitement, fluctuation, suspense, crisis, appeasement; and all this anonymously, without place, actors, circumstances, named or described, without a word spoken.  Poetry has to supply definite thought, arguments driving at a conclusion, ideas mortgaged to this or that creed or system; and to give force to these can command only a few rhythms limited by the duration of a human breath and the pitch of an octave.  The little effects worked out in this small compass music sweeps up and builds into vast fabrics of emotion with a dissolute freedom undreamed of in any other art.”