ed 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