and that which the same people
perceive in a flower. Is it not simpler to use different words? In any
case, the distinction is a real one: compare your delight in a flower or
a gem with what you feel before a great work of art, and you will find
no difficulty, I think, in differing from Whistler.

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importance of an historical document.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 bl