There is more truth in the assertion that many artists who had a high reputation in their lifetime are now more or less disregarded, though it does not follow from this that there has been a reversal of opinion on the part of the public, or a variation in the acuteness of æsthetic perception. Generally we find that these artists very properly held the position they occupied in their time and country, and if they do not now stand on exalted pedestals it is only because we compare them with men of other periods and places, which their contemporary countrymen did not do, at least for the purpose of establishing their permanent position in art. Carlo Maratta for instance was celebrated in Italy as the best painter of his country in his time, and even now we must so regard him, but his contemporaries as with ourselves did not place him on so high a level as his great predecessors of the sixteenth century, and some of the seventeenth. A special reason why many of the seventeenth century artists of Italy have fallen in public esteem may be found in the fact that they excelled mostly in the production of sensorial beauty, paying little attention to intellectual grace, and the ripening of general intelligence as time goes on makes us more and more sensitive to beauty of mind. NOTE 12. PAGE 34 There have been many definitions of "Impressionism" given, but they vary considerably. Professor Clausen describes it as the work of a number of artists whose interest is in recording effects of light, seeking to express nature only and disregarding old conventions.[a] Mr. D. S. MacColl says that an impressionist is[b] a painter who, out of the completed contacts of vision constructs an image moulded upon his own interest in the thing seen, and not on that of any imaginary schoolmaster. This definition is insufficient by itself, but the writer makes his meaning clearer in the same article when he says: Impressionism is the art that surveys the field, and determines which of the shapes and tones are of chief importance to the interested eye, and expresses these and sacrifices the rest. According to C. Mauclair, an acknowledged authority on impressionism, the impressionist holds: Light becomes the one subject of a picture. The interest of the objects on which it shines is secondary. Painting thus understood becomes an art of pure optics, a seeking for harmonies, a species of natural poem, entirely distinct from expression, style, drawing, which have formed the main endeavour of preceding painting. It is almost necessary to invent a new word for this special art, which, while remaining throughout pictural, approaches music in the same degree as it departs from literature or psychology.[c]