In their galleries we are beset with a dim
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.
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