esthetics could never create classifications capable of defining and
containing the infinite gradations of creative temperaments.

In art, classifications have rarely any value, and are rather damaging.
Realism and Idealism are abstract terms which cannot suffice to
characterise beings who obey their sensibility. It is therefore
necessary to invent as many words as there are remarkable men. If
Leonardo was a great painter, are Turner and Monet not painters at all?
There is no connection between them; their methods of thought and
expression are antithetical. Perhaps it will be most simple, to admire
them all, and to renounce any further definition of the painter,
adopting this word to mark the man who uses the palette as his means of
expression.

Thus preoccupation with contemporary emotions, substitution of character
for classic beauty (or of emotional beauty for formal beauty), admission
of the _genre_-painter into the first rank, composition based upon the
reciprocal reaction of values, subordination of the subject to the
interest of execution, the effort to isolate the art of painting from
the ideas inherent to that of literature, and particularly the
instinctive move towards the "symphonisation" of colours, and
consequently towards music,--these are the principal features of the
aesthetic code of the Realist-Impressionists, if this term may be
applied to a group of men hostile towards esthetics such as they are
generally taught.




III