Impressionism has taken root, since its followers can sell their
canvases, and since they are admired and praised by a solid and
ever-growing section of the public. The hour has therefore arrived,
calmly to consider a movement which has imposed itself upon the history
of French art from 1860 to 1900 with extreme energy, to leave
dithyrambics as well as polemics, and to speak of it with a view to
exactness. The Academy, in continuing the propagation of an ideal of
beauty fixed by canons derived from Greek, Latin and Renaissance art,
and neglecting the Gothic, the Primitives and the Realists, looks upon
itself as the guardian of the national tradition, because it exercises
an hierarchic authority over the _Ecole de Rome_, the _Salons_, and the
_Ecole des Beaux Arts_. All the same, its ideals are of very mixed
origin and very little French. Its principles are the same by which the
academic art of nearly all the official schools of Europe is governed.
This mythological and allegorical art, guided by dogmas and formulas
which are imposed upon all pupils regardless of their temperament, is
far more international than national. To an impartial critic this
statement will show in an even more curious light the excommunication
jealously issued by the academic painters against French artists, who,
far from revolting in an absurd spirit of _parti-pris_ against the
genius of their race, are perhaps more sincerely attached to it than
their persecutors. Why should a group of men deliberately choose to
paint mad, illogical, bad pictures, and reap a harvest of public
derision, poverty and sterility? It would be uncritical to believe
merely in a general mystification which makes its authors the worst
sufferers. Simple common sense will find in these men a conviction, a
sincerity, a sustained effort, and this alone should, in the name of the
sacred solidarity of those who by various means try to express their
love of the beautiful, suppress the annoying accusations hurled too
light-heartedly against Manet and his friends.