distrust. And to distrust is more humiliating than to be distrusted. How
many of these landscape-painters, deliberately rash, are painting the
truth of their own impressions? An ethical question as to loyalty is
easily answered; truth and falsehood as to fact are, happily for the
intelligence of the common conscience, not hard to divide. But when the
_dubium_ concerns not fact but artistic truth, can the many be sure that
their sensitiveness, their candour, their scruple, their delicate
equipoise of perceptions, the vigilance of their apprehension, are
enough? Now Impressionists of late have told us things as to their
impressions--as to the effect of things upon the temperament of this man
and upon the mood of that--which should not be asserted except on the
artistic point of honour. The majority can tell ordinary truth, but they
should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary. They can face the
general judgment, but they should hesitate to produce work that appeals
to the last judgment, which is the judgment within. There is too much
reason to divine that a certain number of those who aspire to derive from
the greatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of, no point
of view worth seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no mood worth
waylaying. And to be, _de parti pris_, an Impressionist without
these! O Velasquez! Nor is literature quite free from a like reproach
in her own things. An author, here and there, will make as though he had
a word worth hearing--nay, worth over-hearing--a word that seeks to
withdraw even while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is
all too probably a platitude. But obviously, literature is not--as is
the craft and mystery of painting--so at the mercy of a half-imposture,
so guarded by unprovable honour. For the art of painting is reserved
that shadowy risk, that undefined salvation. May the gods guard us from
the further popularising of Impressionism; for the point of honour is the
simple secret of the few.