Our wandering through the Century Exhibition led us finally past the great landscape-men, the founders of modern landscape-painting, to Manet and Monet, Renoir and Degas, with whom a new century of art begins. In a later section on the Caillebotte room in the Luxembourg Museum, I shall study closely the authors of the Open Air Movement. The fight against the children of classicism and romance was furious, and “free-light” was victorious in the degree in which it deserved victory. But even in those days of turmoil there were idyllists who remained undisturbed by the tumult, and did not notice it. Gustave Moreau painted his colour stories from a palette of gold and precious stones, from a palette of Limosin and the glass-painters of Gothic cathedrals, as if there had never existed an “Olympia” of Manet or a “Funeral Procession of Ornans,” of Courbet. The high importance of Moreau, to whom I return in a special study, lies in the fact that he teaches us the feebleness of all classification of art development into epochs. True artists are not subject to time, and move side by side without influencing reciprocally their orbits. They are not subject to Newton’s law of gravitation. The Century Exhibition taught us something more. It sharpened our sight for distinguishing between the literary painters and the painters proper. The former, as a rule, find fame quicker than the latter, but their fame affects posterity as a bad jest. They are illustrators of the time, and what it brings, that is the worthless, art-destroying “actuality.” Every attempt to put painting at the service of contemporary thought, to demand of it philosophical collaboration in the development of political, moral, and social doctrines, is a sin against an art whose essence directs it to the eternal aspects of the phenomenal world. Only those are genuine painter temperaments which can follow reflectively the play of light on surfaces in motion, and tell us what feelings this play awakens in them. All symbolism, all allegory, all graphic accompaniment of poetry, is weak. Only what has been really seen has permanence, even if it is reproduced with little skill. You cannot paint from hearsay, only from the impressions which the eye takes in, and the soul delivers. It is astonishing that so primitive a biological truth should be so difficult to grasp. VI THE SCHOOL OF 1830