yellow--sees the other two primary colours, red and blue; in other
words, he sees violet. Therefore Anquetin paints the street, and
everything in it, violet--boots, trousers, hats, coats, lamp-posts,
paving-stones, and the tail of the cat disappearing under the _porte
cochere_.

But if in my description of these schools I have conveyed the idea of
stupidity or ignorance I have failed egregiously. These young men are
all highly intelligent and keenly alive to art, and their doings are
not more vain than the hundred and one artistic notions which have
been undermining the art-sense of the French and English nations for
the last twenty years. What I have described is not more foolish than
the stippling at South Kensington or the drawing by the masses at
Julien's. The theory of the division of the tones is no more foolish
than the theory of _plein air_ or the theory of the square brushwork;
it is as foolish, but not a jot more foolish.

Great art dreams, imagines, sees, feels, expresses--reasons never. It
is only in times of woful decadence, like the present, that the
bleating of the schools begins to be heard; and although, to the
ignorant, one method may seem less ridiculous than another, all
methods--I mean, all methods that are not part and parcel of the
pictorial intuition--are equally puerile and ridiculous. The
separation of the method of expression from the idea to be expressed
is the sure sign of decadence. France is now all decadence. In the
Champ de Mars, as in the Salon, the man of the hour is he who has
invented the last trick in subject or treatment.

France has produced great artists in quick succession. Think of all
the great names, beginning with Ingres and ending with Degas, and