things, but of rendering them.  It expresses no idea and sees no relations; its claims on one’s interest are exhausted when once its right to its method is admitted.  The remark once made of a typically literal person—­that he cared so much for facts that he disliked to think they had any relations—­is intimately applicable to the whole impressionist school.  Technically, of course, the impressionist’s relations are extremely just—­not exquisite, but exquisitely just.  But merely to get just values is not 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