------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIII · INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES “C’EST L’AFFIRMATION GRANDIOSE DE L’EFFORT VERS LE BEAU QUE CERTAINS ARTISTES INDÉPENDANTS TRAITÈRENT À UN MOMENT DONNÉ EN DEHORS DE LA TRADITION ET DES FORMULES ACQUISES” _GEORGES LECOMTE_ IT is the fashion nowadays amongst a certain class of art-critics to adopt the pessimistic note. They laud the past, deplore the present, and display sympathetic alarm for the future of art and artists. Should a modern manifestation of art be under discussion, some phase undeniably good and universally accepted by those best qualified to form an opinion, these critics recognise it with a guarded qualification and a prophecy of its speedy decadence in the immediate future; and these depreciatory remarks are extended to all those artists who have been attracted by the new movement and have ranged themselves under its banner. It has always been so. In the art literature of the past we read of Delacroix and the decadence, of Corot and the downfall, of Monet and the abyss. There are still living in France aged and honoured professors, members of the Institute and of the Salon juries, who believe that the teaching of Claude Monet has been a national calamity. They hold that art no longer exists, having been destroyed by these dreadful innovations. Is it not strange that the birth of new methods, rather than the death of old ones, should be heralded with melancholy head-shakings, with frequent and wrathful imprecations upon the impious intruders! Time rights all things. The new to-day is old to-morrow, the exotic becomes classic, and one more page is added to the history of the evolution of art.