In fine, the impressionist has his own conventions; no school can escape them, from the very nature of the case and the definition of the term. The conventions of the impressionists, indeed, are particularly salient. Can anyone doubt it who sees an exhibition of their works? In the same number of classic, or romantic, or merely realistic pictures, is there anything quite equalling the monotony that strikes one in a display of canvasses by Claude Monet and his fellows and followers? But the defect of impressionism is not mainly its technical conventionality. It is, as I think everyone except its thick-and-thin advocates must feel, that pursued _a outrance_ it lacks a seriousness commensurate with its claims--that it exhibits indeed a kind of undertone of frivolity that is all the nearer to the absolutely comic for the earnestness, so to speak, of its unconsciousness. The reason is, partly no doubt, to be ascribed to its _debonnaire_ self-satisfaction, its disposition to "lightly run amuck at an august thing," the traditions of centuries namely, to its bumptiousness, in a word. But chiefly, I think, the reason is to be found in its lack of anything properly to be called a philosophy. This is surely a fatal flaw in any system, because it involves a contradiction in terms; and to say that to have no philosophy is the philosophy of the impressionists, is merely a word-juggling bit of question-begging. A theory of technic is not a philosophy, however systematic it may be. It is a mechanical, not an intellectual, point of view. It is not a way of looking at things, but of rendering them. It expresses no idea and sees no relations; its claims on one's interest are exhausted when once its right to its method is admitted. The remark once made of a typically literal person--that he cared so much for facts that he disliked to think they had any relations--is intimately applicable to the whole impressionist school. Technically, of course, the impressionist's relations are extremely just--not exquisite, but exquisitely just. But merely to get just values is not to occupy one's self with values ideally, emotionally, personally. It is merely to record facts. Certainly any impressionist rendering of the light and shade and color relations of objects seems eloquent beside any traditional and conventional rendering of them; but it is because each object is so carefully observed, so truly painted, that its relation to every other is spontaneously satisfactory; and this is a very different thing from the result of truly pictorial rendering with its constructive appeal, its sense of _ensemble_, its presentation of an idea by means of the convergence and interdependence of objects focussed to a common and central effect. To this impressionism is absolutely insensitive. It is the acme of detachment, of indifference.