of lighting. Any one of them, taken singly, is but a portrait of two
straw stacks, and the world will not permanently or deeply care about
those straw stacks. The study of light is, in itself, no more an
exercise of the artistic faculties than the study of anatomy or the
study of perspective; and while Impressionism has put a keener edge upon
some of the tools of the artist, it has inevitably failed to produce a
school of art.

After Impressionism, what? We have no name for it but
Post-Impressionism. Such men as Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh recognized
the sterility of Impressionism and of a narrow æstheticism, while they
shared the hatred of the æsthetes and the Impressionists for the current
art of the salons. No more than the æsthetes or the Impressionists were
they conscious of any social or universal ideals that demanded
expression. The æsthetes had a doctrine; the Impressionists had a method
and a technic. The Post-Impressionists had nothing, and were driven to
the attempt at pure self-expression--to the exaltation of the great god
Whim. They had no training, they recognized no traditions, they spoke to
no public. Each was to express, as he thought best, whatever he happened
to feel or to think, and to invent, as he went along, the language in
which he should express it. I think some of these men had the elements
of genius in them and might have done good work; but their task was a
heart-breaking and a hopeless one. An art cannot be improvised, and an
artist must have some other guide than unregulated emotion. The path
they entered upon had been immemorially marked "no passing"; for many of
them the end of it was suicide or the madhouse.

But whatever the aberrations of these, the true
Post-Impressionists--whatever the ugliness, the eccentricity, or the
moral dinginess into which they were betrayed--I believe them to have