He is himself the prominent representative of the school, however, and the fact that one representative of it is enough to consider, is eloquent of profound criticism of it.  For decorative purposes a hole in one’s wall, an additional window through which one may only look satisfactorily during a period of thirty minutes, has its drawbacks.  A walk in the country or in a city park is after all preferable to anyone who can really appreciate a Monet—­that is, anyone who can feel the illusion of nature which it is his sole aim to produce.  After all, what one asks of art is something different from imitative illusion.  Its essence is illusion, I think, but illusion taken in a different sense from optical illusion—­trompe-l’oeil.  Its function is to make dreams seem real, not to recall reality.  Monet is enduringly admirable mainly to the painter who envies and endeavors to imitate his wonderful power of technical expression—­the thing that occupies most the conscious attention of the true painter.  To others he must remain a little unsatisfactory, because he is not only not a dreamer, but because he does nothing with his material except to show it as it is—­a great service surely, but largely excluding the exercise of that architectonic faculty, personally directed, which is the very life of every truly aesthetic production.

VII

In fine, the impressionist has his own conventions; no school can escape them, from the very nature of the case and the definition of the term.  The conventions of the impressionists, indeed, are particularly salient.  Can anyone doubt it who sees an exhibition of their works?  In the same number of classic, or romantic, or merely realistic pictures, is there anything quite equalling the monotony that strikes one in a display of canvasses by Claude Monet and his fellows and followers?  But the defect of impressionism is not mainly its technical conventionality.  It is, as I think everyone except its thick-and-thin advocates must feel, that pursued a outrance it lacks a seriousness commensurate with its claims—­that it exhibits indeed a kind of undertone of frivolity that is all the nearer to the absolutely comic for the earnestness, so to speak, of its unconsciousness.  The reason is, partly no doubt, to be ascribed to its debonnaire self-satisfaction, its disposition to “lightly run amuck at an august thing,” the traditions of centuries namely, to its bumptiousness, in a word.  But chiefly, I think, the reason is to be found in its lack of anything properly to be called a philosophy.  This is surely a fatal flaw in any system, because it involves a contradiction in terms; and to say that to have no philosophy is the philosophy of the impressionists, is merely a word-juggling bit of question-begging.  A theory of technic is not a philosophy, however systematic it may be.  It is a mechanical, not an intellectual, point of view.  It is not a way of looking at