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.
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