The old, old conflict between materialism and idealism, between seeing-knowing and thinking-feeling, between the cruder actualities of the senses and the finer actualities of the imagination!
It is not that all men at a given time are idealists and at another realists, any more than all painters in one decade are Impressionists, in another Post-Impressionists. Life does not move that way.
Between 1874 and 1900 Impressionism forged to the front and monopolized the attention of the art world, yet during that period there were painted more pictures of the Pre-Impressionist schools than ever before. The Impressionists made all the noise, the Pre-Impressionists did most of the work.
The net result was a large amount of absorption by the older schools of the good things in Impressionism, and a noticeable improvement in painting generally.
Just now the Post-Impressionists occupy the center of the stage and are making themselves so conspicuous the public is almost led to believe that both Impressionists and Pre-Impressionists no longer exist, that everything once considered good in art is being relegated to the storehouse.
Again, as a matter of fact, with all the noise made by the Post-Impressionists, it is beyond question true that never before were so many Impressionist and Pre-Impressionist pictures painted as now.
The stream of Pre-Impressionist and Impressionist pictures goes right on and in time history will repeat itself, the good in Post-Impressionism will be absorbed and the main current that supplies the great public with art will be Pre-impressionist + Impressionist + Post-impressionist, with as many more prefixes as the ingenuity of the artist can devise to describe his vagaries.
Painters are a good deal like inventors, each of whom thinks his invention sure to revolutionize the world, to find in the end that his supposed invention is either not new or if new not valuable.