_Application of the Law to Painting._
If any art should be given over to impressionalism it seems as if it
should be painting. To see and to transmit what is seen,--is not this
the true office of the painter, his undoubted mission? Yes, on condition
that the artist has the requisites for seeing correctly! And if he rises
to composition, he must also be endowed with a creative intellect, with
a portion of that mental power which will permit him to embrace a
conception synthetically, and to cooerdinate its parts.
Among the impressionalists of our time, there are assuredly painters of
talent; but what talent they possess is, as it were, against their will:
the influence of tradition, the weight of the medium in which they live
unconsciously restrain them. Then, it must be confessed, this
impressionability of the artist has its intrinsic merits, if it is kept
to its place and degree; but it must be regarded as certain, that if the
_simpliste_ artist makes himself distinct in his work, it is because he
contains within himself more of the requisites for what he undertakes,
and because, without his having summoned them, the faculties of the
understanding and the aesthetic sense have come to his aid.
If Delsarte admitted the precept that "everything is perceived in the
manner of the perceiver," he, of course, did not admit that every
perceiver should make his own law: his conception of the aesthetic
trilogy would never have permitted him to open this Babel for the vanity
of ignorance.
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