These questions are of the highest importance, but they cannot be determined. We are acquainted with certain facts relating to the general development of the sense organs, and of the imagination; and in regard to the former we know that there is a limit within comprehensible bounds, but we see only very dimly anything finite in the scope of the imagination. With what other term than "limitless" can we describe the imagination of a Shakespeare? But in all cases, whatever the natural conditions at birth, it is clear that hard work is the key to success in art, and though some must work harder than others to arrive at an equal result, it is satisfactory to know that generally Carlyle was right when he described "genius" as the transcendent capacity for taking trouble, and we are not surprised that Cicero should have come to the conclusion that diligence is a virtue that seems to include all the others.
Seeing that the conclusions above defined (and some to be later drawn), are not entirely in accord with a large part of modern criticism based upon what are commonly described as new and improved forms of the painter's art, it is necessary to refer to these forms, which are generally comprehended under what is known as Impressionism.[c] Alas, to the frailty of man must we ascribe the spread of this movement, which has destroyed so many bright young intellects, and is at this moment leading thousands of gentle spirits along the level path which ends in despair. For the real road of art is steep, and difficult, and long. Year upon year of patient thought, patient observation, and patient toil, lie ahead of every man who covets a crown of success as a painter. He must seek to accumulate vast stores of knowledge of the human form and its anatomy, of nature in her prolific variety, of linear and aerial perspective, of animals which move on land or through the air, of the laws of colours and their combinations. He must sound the depths of poetry, and sculpture, and architecture; absorb the cream of sacred and profane history; and with all these things and many more, he must saturate his mind with the practical details of his art. Every artist whose work the world has learned to admire has done his best to gain this knowledge, and certainly no great design was ever produced by one whose youth and early manhood were not worn with ardent study. For knowledge and experience are the only foundations upon which the imagination can build. Every new conception is a rearrangement of known signs, and the imagination is powerless to arrange them appropriately without a thorough comprehension of their character and significance.
This then is the programme of work which must be adopted by any serious aspirant to fame in the art of the painter, and it is perhaps not surprising that the number of artists who survive the ordeal is strictly limited. In any walk of life where years of struggle are necessary for success, how small the proportion of men who persevere to the end; who present a steel wall to misfortune and despair, and with an indomitable will, overcome care, and worry, and fatigue, for year after year, till at last the clouds disappear, and they are able to front the world with an all-powerful shield of radiant knowledge! But unfortunately in the painter's art it is difficult to convince students of the necessity for long and hard study, because there is no definite standard for measuring success or failure which they can grasp without long experience. In industries where knowledge is applied to improvement in appliances, or methods with definite ends, or to the realization of projects having a fixed scope, failure is determined by material results measured commonly by mathematical processes of one kind or another. A man produces a new alloy which he claims will fulfil a certain purpose. It is tested by recognized means: all concerned admit the validity of the test, and there the matter ends. But in the arts, while the relative value of the respective grades is equally capable of demonstration, the test is of a different kind. Instead of weights and measures which every man can apply, general experience must be brought in. The individual may be right in his judgment, and commonly is, but he is unable to measure the evidence of his senses by material demonstration, and as he has no means of judging whether his senses are normal, except by comparison, he is liable to doubt his own experience if it clash with that of others. Thus, he may find but little beauty in a given picture, and then may read or hear that the work has a high æsthetic value, and without calling to mind the fact that no evidence in the matter is conclusive unless it be based on general experience, he is liable to believe that his own perception is in some way deficient.
Thus in the arts, and particularly in painting, there is ample scope for the spread of false principles. Poetry has an advantage in that the intellect must first be exercised before the simplest pictures are thrown on the brain, so feeble or eccentric verse appeals to very few persons, and seldom has a clientèle, if one may use the word, outside of small coteries of weak thinkers. It is difficult also in sculpture to put forward poor works as of a high order, because this art deals almost entirely with simple human and animal forms in respect of which the knowledge is universal, and so as signs they cannot be varied except in the production of what would be immediately recognized as monstrosities. But in painting an immense variety in kind of beauty may be produced, from a simple colour harmony to the representation of ideal forms involving the highest sensorial and intellectual reaches, and there is ample scope for the misrepresentation of æsthetic effects—for the suggestion that a work yielding a momentary appeal to the senses is superior to a high form of permanent beauty.
It is to the ease with which simple forms of ephemeral beauty may be produced in painting that is due the large number of artists who should never have entered upon the profession. Nearly every person of average intelligence is capable with a few lessons of producing excellent imitations of natural things in colour, as for instance, flowers, bits of landscape, and so on, and great numbers of young men and women, surprised at the facility with which this work can be done, erroneously suppose that nature has endowed them with special gifts, and so take up the art of painting as a career. Hence for every sculptor there are twenty painters. Now these youthful aspirants usually start with determination and hope, but although they know the value of studious toil, they rarely comprehend that this toil, long continued, is the only key to success. Most of them seem under the impression that inspiration will come to their assistance, and that their genius will enable them to dispense with much of the labour which others, less fortunate, must undertake. They do not understand that all painters, even a Raphael, must go through long years of hard application.
We need not be surprised that there should be occasional eruptions in art circles tending to the exaltation of the immature at the expense of the superior, or even the sublime, for we have always with us the undiligent man of talent, and the "unrecognized genius." But hitherto, movements of the kind have not been serious, for with one exception they are lost in oblivion, and the exception is little more than a vague memory. That the present movement should have lasted so long is not difficult to understand when we remember the modern advantages for the spread of new sensations—the exhibitions, the unlimited advertising scope, and above all the new criticism, with its extended vocabulary, its original philosophy, and its boundless discoveries as to the psychological and musical qualities of paint. That history is silent as to previous eruptions of the kind before the seventeenth century is a matter of regret. It is unlikely that the greatest of all art epochs experienced an impressionist fever, for one cannot imagine the spread of spurious principles within measurable distance of a State (Thebes) which went so far as to prohibit the representation of unbeautiful things. In respect of poetry we know that the Greeks stood no nonsense, for did not Zoilus suffer an ignominious death for venturing upon childish criticism of Homer? In Rome eccentric painters certainly found some means to thrive, for where "Bohemian" poets gathered, who neglected the barber and the bath, and pretended an æsthetic exclusiveness, there surely would painters of "isms" be found in variety. Naturally in the early stages of the Renaissance, when patronage of the arts was almost confined to the Church, and so went hand in hand with learning,