we lose interest in the merely representative character of Renoir's work and wander with him into the rich garden of experience where imagination and beauty rule over matter. Renoir is a master precisely because he stamped the meanings—truth, rationality, humanity, beauty—upon his works, upon the world, and upon us. Not the least of the charm is the simple, direct way he does it: he never defrauds us of our right to intelligence and to a richer vicarious life by either overwhelming the senses, or by bewildering, or by a mystic, irrational sentimentalism. We feel that the paintings are more important than the things he painted.
By what technical means Renoir wrought his magic is a question of no great moment to the appreciator, of but secondary interest to the connoisseur, and the cause of much literary effort and loose thinking on the part of professional critics. Renoir as a free spirit, responsible only to his vision, intelligence and sincerity, has been the target for the fierce opprobrium of those for whom congealed memories and outworn traditions—the academicians—serve as substitutes for thinking and feeling. These, the "vested interests" of art, argue that Renoir's drawing is wrong, his colour raucous, his composition bad. The artists and connoisseurs in whom ideas function in the place of the debris of the academicians, see in Renoir's drawing accurate expressiveness, in his colour a harmony and a structural value in the creation of forms, and in his composition an exquisite sense of the fitness of things. The amateur with even a moderate acquaintance with Renoirs work is very sure that the drawing, made up as it is of convincing colour, iridescent light, parts of form, and loose indeterminate line, constitutes one of the many rhythmic, musical paths into an altogether delightful poetic realm. He feels that the colour sings harmoniously and richly but never stridently; that the composition is made up of charming sensuous elements dramatically meaningful; that the picture soon ceases to be drawing, colour, composition; that it becomes a repose saturated with the spirit of place, where self is no more, where all is peace and harmony and music and poetry. Awakened from the dream, he goes back to life with a conviction and a memory that Renoir breathes the spirit of perpetual youth in a garden of perennial June loveliness.
