to occupy one's
self with values ideally, emotionally, personally. It is merely to
record facts. Certainly any impressionist rendering of the light and
shade and color relations of objects seems eloquent beside any
traditional and conventional rendering of them; but it is because each
object is so carefully observed, so truly painted, that its relation to
every other is spontaneously satisfactory; and this is a very different
thing from the result of truly pictorial rendering with its constructive
appeal, its sense of _ensemble_, its presentation of an idea by means of
the convergence and interdependence of objects focussed to a common and
central effect. To this impressionism is absolutely insensitive. It is
the acme of detachment, of indifference.

Turgenieff, according to Mr. George Moore, complained of Zola's Gervaise
Coupeau, that Zola explained how she felt, never what she thought.
"Qu'est que ca me fait si elle suait sous les bras, ou au milieu du
dos?" he asked, with most pertinent penetration. He is quite right.
Really we only care for facts when they explain truths. The desultory
agglomeration of never so definitely rendered details necessarily leaves
the civilized appreciation cold. What distinguishes the civilized from
the savage appreciation is the passion for order. The tendency to order,
said Senancour, should form "an essential part of our inclinations, of
our instinct, like the tendencies to self-preservation and to
reproduction." The two latter tendencies the savage possesses as
completely as the civilized man, but he does not share the civilized
man's instinct for correlation. And in this sense, I think, a certain
savagery is justly to be ascribed to the impressionist. His productions
have many attractions and many merits--merits and attractions that the
traditional painting has not. But they are really only by a kind of
automatic inadvertence, pictures. They are not truly pictorial.

And a picture should be something more than even pictorial. To be
permanently attaching it should give at least a hint of the painter's
philosophy--his point of view, his attitude toward his material. In the
great pictures you can not only discover this attitude, but the attitude
of the painter toward life and the world in general. Everyone has as
distinct an idea of the philosophy of Raphael as of the qualities of his
designs. The impressionist not only does not show you what he thinks, he
does not even show you how he