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When Impressionism has had its day and done its best, then something different must come, and logically that something different is a return to the art that is the antithesis of Impressionism—the art of the imagination—a creative art.[14]

For a generation the poetic, the imaginative work of the Barbizon School—to use this one school as typical of the painting of practically the entire western world in the sixties and seventies—held sway.

Then came the return to nature, the Impressionists, and for a generation they held sway.

Now, apparently, we are at the beginning of a new movement, a return to imaginative art, and the evidences of this return are seen not only in painting but in decoration, in sculpture, in music, in drama, in literature, in fiction, in philosophy, in medicine, in business, in politics.

There is a demand for ideals as distinguished from results.

We have learned that the proper end of poetry is the expression of emotion, to which all reasoning and statement of fact should be subsidiary; but we have not learned that painting should have the same end, using representation only as a means to that end, and representing only those facts of reality which have emotional associations for the painter. In primitive pictures, it is true, we look for the expression of emotion rather than for illusion, and that is the reason why so many people get a real pleasure from primitive art. They judge it by the right standard, and ask of it what it offers to them. But from modern pictures they demand illusion—that is to say, the kind of representation they are used to; and when they do not get it they accuse the artist of incompetence.[15]