The “Impressionists” of the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg painted brightly when the _salon_ was correspondingly dark. The one light picture among the dark paintings acted like a window that opens in the gloomy wall to the sunny air. When the other painters saw that the multitude flew towards this bright point, like moths after the flame of a taper, they hastened to paint also in bright colours. “Free light” was discovered. It corresponded to no mood of the period. Free light is joyous and satisfied. The spirit of the age was, during its predominance in painting, pessimistic and sick with longing as it had hardly ever been in the past. Nor was it a new way of seeing and feeling nature. Turner, Corot, Claude Lorrain, Ostade, Salvator Rosa himself had seen and felt nature quite as brightly as Manet and Monet had done. The truth is that the “Impressionists” were turbulent young people who got angry at vegetating in obscurity whilst Gudin and Schnetz, Signol and Müller, Pils, Cabanel, Dubufe, and Robert Fleury had all the honours and successes; and that impelled by envious loathing of these celebrities of that day, they found, as it were, in a negative chemo-tropical way, the exact reverse of their dark style. Five years ago the same incident was played off exactly in the opposite direction. Everybody was painting in a bright style. The Schnetz and Cabanel, Delaunay and Cogniet of the day were called Puvis de Chavannes and Roll, Besnard and Cazin. Then, again, some young people got angry about their being unknown and unheeded, and they entered, consciously and of set purpose, into opposition against the celebrities of the day. Charles Cottet exhibited a black picture which, in the middle of a blinding white exhibition wall, struck just as glaringly as did, thirty years ago, the bright picture in the middle of the black wall. Cottet had hit the bull’s eye. He instantly created a school, and to-day the _salons_ look once more as they did thirty years ago, to be once more flooded with free light, probably, some twenty or thirty years hence. It is an orbit without beginning or end, an eternal beginning over again, and only posing fools seek, in this monotonous, periodical return of the same effects under the influence of the same causes, to ferret out connections with definite phenomena of the times.