from the chronological difficulties in the way—­any more than Courbet and Manet started Whistler; yet both these painters played important roles in the American master’s art.  So let us accept Mauclair’s dictum as to Claude Monet’s priority in the field of impressionism.  Certainly he attained his marked style before he met Manet.  Later he modified his own paint to show his sympathy with the new school.  Monet went to Watteau, Constable, Monticelli for his ideas, and in London, about 1870, he studied Turner with an interest that finally bordered on worship.  And why not?  In Turner, at the National Gallery, you may find the principles of impressionism carried to extravagant lengths, and years before Monet.  Consider Rain, Steam and Speed—­the Great Western Railway, that vision of a locomotive dashing across a bridge in chromatic chaos.  Or the Sea Piece in the James Orrock collection—­a welter of crosshatchings in variegated hues wherein any school of impressionism from Watteau’s Embarkment to Monet’s latest manner or the pointillisme of Signac and Seurat may be recognised.  And there is a water-colour of Turner’s in the National Gallery called Honfleur, which has anticipated many traits of Boudin and the Manet we know when he had not forgotten Eugene Boudin’s influence.

Let us enjoy our Monet without too many “mole runs.”  As De Kay pointed out, it was not necessary for Monet to go to London to see Constables.  In the Louvre he could gaze upon them at leisure, also upon Bonington; not to mention the Venetians and such a Dutchman as Vermeer.  It is therefore doubly interesting to study the Monets at Durand-Ruel’s.  There are twenty-seven, and they range as far back as 1872, Promenade a Trouville, and come down to the Charing Cross Bridge, 1904, and the two Waterloo Bridge effects, 1903.  It is a wide range in sentiment and technique.  The Mills in Holland of 1874 is as cool and composed as Boudin.  Sincerity and beauty are in the picture—­for we do not agree with those who see in Monet only an unemotional recorder of variations in light and tone.  He can compose a background as well as any of his contemporaries, and an important fact is overlooked when Monet is jumbled indiscriminately with a lot of inferior men.  Monet knew how to draw before he handled pigment.  Some lansdcape painters do not; many impressionists trust to God and their palette-knife; so the big men are sufferers.  Monet, it may be noted, essayed many keys; his compositions are not nearly so monotonous as has been asserted.  What does often exhaust the optic nerve is the violent impinging thereon of his lights.  He has an eagle eye, we have not.  Wagner had the faculty of attention developed to such an extraordinary pitch that with our more normal and weaker nerves he soon exhausts us in his flights.  Too much Monet is like too much Wagner or too much sunshine.

The breezy effect with the poplars painted flat is an example very unlike Monet.  The church of Varengeville at Dieppe (1880) is a classic specimen; so is the Pourville beach (1882).  What delicate greens in the Spring (1885)!  What fine distance, an ocean view, in the Pourville picture!  Or, if you care for subdued harmonies, there is the ice floe at Vetheuil (1881).