The truth is that the ecstasy of art and good actions are closely interrelated, the one leading to the other in endless succession or possibly even progression.
"Dites, monsieur Vollard, c'est effrayant, la vie!" [J]
[Footnote J: Since writing these words I learn that the director of the Tate Gallery has been unable to find, in his series of vast rooms, space for two small and fine works by Cézanne. It is some consolation to know that he has found space for more than twenty by Professor Tonks.]
[Footnote K: _Renoir_. Par Albert André. Crès et Cie.]
Renoir is the greatest painter alive. [L] There are admirers of Matisse and admirers of Picasso who will contradict that, though the artists themselves would probably agree. Also, there are admirers of M. Bouguereau and of Sir Marcus Stone, there are Italian Futurists and members of the New English Art Club, with whom one bandies no words. Renoir is the greatest painter alive.
[Footnote L: This essay was written in 1919. He died in 1920.]
He is over forty: to be exact, he is seventy-seven years old. Yet, in the teeth of modern theories that have at least the air of physiological certainties, one must admit that he is still alive. A comparison between the five-and-thirty photographs reproduced by M. Besson and those at the end of Herr Meier-Graefe's monograph suggests that even since 1910 his art has developed. But what is certain is that, during his last period, since 1900 that is to say, though so crippled by rheumatism that it is with agonizing difficulty he handles a brush, he has produced works that surpass even the masterpieces of his middle age.
Renoir was born in 1841, and in '54 bound prentice to a china-painter. A fortunate invention deprived him of this means of livelihood and drove him into oil. He escaped early from the École des Beaux-Arts, and, of course, came under the influence of Courbet. By 1863 he was being duly refused at the Salon and howled at by the respectable mob. He thus made one of the famous _Salon des Refusés_, and has, in consequence, been generally described as an "Impressionist." It is an honour he neither desires nor deserves. The pure doctrine of Impressionism, as formulated by Claude Monet, enjoins "scientific truth" and submission to Nature, whereas Renoir observed one day to an astonished disciple, "Avec la Nature on ne fait rien"; and on being asked where, then, the student should learn his art added, without any apparent sign of shame or sense of sin--"Au musée, parbleu!"