In giving nearly his whole attention to colour the impressionist limits his art to the feeblest form, and produces a quickly tiring, ephemeral thing, as if unconscious of natural beauty. Sylvan glades and fairy dales, where the brooks ripple pleasantly as they moisten the roots of the violet, and gently lave the feet of the lark and the robin; where shady trees bow welcome to the wanderer; where the grassy carpet is sprinkled with flowers, and every bush can tell of lovers' sighs! Does the impressionist see these things? Offer him the sweetest beauties of nature, and he shows you in return a shake of a kaleidoscope. Mountain peaks towering one above the other till their snowy crests sparkle the azure sky; mighty rivers dividing the hills, crumbling the granite cliffs, or thundering their course over impeding rocks; cascades of flowing crystal falling into seething seas of foam and mist; the angry ocean convulsively defying human power with its heaving walls and fearsome caverns! Nature in her grandest form: sublime forces which kindle the spirit of man: exhibit them to the impressionist, and he presents to you a flat experiment in the juxtaposition of pure colours! And the majesty of the human form, with its glorious attributes; the noble woman and courageous man; incidents of self-sacrifice; the realms of spiritual beauty, and the great ideals which expand the mind to the bounds of space and lift the soul to Heaven! What of these? Ask the impressionist, and he knows nothing of them. For his pencil they are but relics of the past, like the bones of the men who immortalized them in art.
This is perhaps an overstatement of impressionism as applied to the works of a large number of artists, who although commonly sacrificing form to colour, infuse more or less interest in the human poses and actions which are nominally the subjects of their pictures. But one can only deal generally with such a matter. The evil of Impressionism does not lie in the presentation of colour harmonies as beautiful things, for they are unquestionably pleasing, though the beauty is purely sensorial and of an ephemeral character. The mischief arises from the declaration, overt or implied, that these harmonies represent the higher reaches of the painter's art, and that form or design therein is of secondary importance. Let something false in thought or activity be propagated in any domain where the trader can make use of it, then surely will the evil grow, each new weed being more rank than its predecessor. Impressionism is not a spurious form of art, but seeing that its spurious claims were widely accepted, with substantial results, there soon appeared innumerable other forms inferior to it. There is no necessity to deal here with these forms, with the crude experiments of Cézanne, the vagaries of Van Gogh,[14] the puerilities of Matisse, or the awful sequence of "isms," commencing with "Post-Impressionism," and ending in the lowest depths of art degradation; but it is proper to point out that so long as Impressionism puts forward its extravagant pretensions, these corrupt forms will continue to taint the realm of art to the detriment of both artists and public.