JH5 ESSAYS AND LETTERS
You will well understand that I do not here undertake to solve the great problems raised by these questions. I am an ignoramus, and have no authority to speak in the name of science or ])liilosop}iy. I am, if you please, simply a novelist, a writer who has at times seen a little way into the heart of things, and whose competence consists only in having observed much and worked much. And it is only as a witness that I allow myself to speak of what my genera- tion — the men who are now fifty years old, and whom your generation will soon regard as ancestors — has been, or at least has wished to be.
I was much struck, a few days ago, at the opening of the Salon du Champde-Mars, by the characteristic apj^earance of the rooms. It is thought that the pictures are always much the same. That is an error. The evolution is slow ; but how astonished one would be to-day were it possible to revert to the Salxms of some former years ! For my part, I well remember the last academic and romantic exhibitions, about 1863. Work in the open air [le plein air) had not yet triumphed ; there was a general tone of bitumen, a dirtying of canvas, a prevalence of burnt colours, the semi- darkness of studios. Then, some fifteen years later, after the victorious and much -contested influence of Manet, I can recall quite other exhibitions, where the clear tone of full sunlight shone ; it was, as it were, an inundation of light, a care for tnith which made each picture-frame a window opened upon Nature bathed in light. And yesterday, after another fifteen years, I could discern, amid the fresh limpidity of the productions, the rising of a kind of mystic fog. There was the same care for clear painting, but the reality was changing, the figures were more elongated, the need of originality and novelty carried the artists over into the land of dreams.
If I have dwelt on these three stages of contemporary painting, I have done so because it seems to me that they correspond very strikingly to the contemporary movements of thought. My generation, indeed, following illustrious predecessors of whom we were but the successors, strove to open the windows wide to Nature, in order to see all and to say all. In our generation, even among those least conscious of it, the long efforts of positive philosophy and of analytical and experimental science came to fruition. Our fealty was to Science, which surrounded us on all sides ; in lier we
