The London pictures tell of the older artist—­not so vigorous, a vein of tenderness beginning to show instead of his youthful blazing optimism.  Claude Monet must have had a happy life—­he is still a robust man painting daily in the fields, leading the glorious life of a landscapist, one of the few romantic professions in this prosaic age.  Not so vain, so irritable as either Manet or Whistler, Monet’s nerves have never prompted him to extravagances.  Backbiters declare that Monet is suffering from an optical degeneration—­poor, overworked word!  Monet sees better, sees more keenly than his fellow-men.  What a misfortune!  Ibsen and Wagner suffered, too, from superior brains.  If Monet ever suffered seriously from a danger to his art it was—­success.  He was abused in the beginning, but not as severely as Manet.  But success perched on Monet’s palette.  His pictures never seem to suggest any time but high noon, in spirit, at least.  And he is never sad.  Yet, is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of sadness?

In his very valuable contribution to the history of the cause, Theodore Duret, the biographer and friend of Whistler and Manet has in his Les Peintres Impressionistes held the scales very much in favour of Manet’s priority in the field over Monet.  It is true that in 1863 Manet had drawn upon his head the thunderous wrath of Paris by exhibiting his Dejeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympe—­by no means a representative effort of the painter’s genius, despite its diabolic cleverness. (It reveals a profound study of Titian, Cranach, and Goya.) But his vision was in reality synthetic, not analytic; he was a primitive; he belongs to the family of Velasquez, Ribera, Goya.  He studied Hals—­and with what glorious results in Le Bon Bock!  He manipulated paint like an “old master” and did astounding things with the higher tones of the colour scale.  He was not an impressionist until he met Monet.  Then in audacity he outstripped his associates.  Discouraged by critical attacks, his courage had been revived by Charles Baudelaire, who fought for Richard Wagner as well as for Poe and Manet.  To the painter the poet scornfully wrote:  “You complain about attacks?  But are you the first to endure them?  Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner?  They were not killed by derision.  And in order not to make you too proud, I must tell you that they are models, each in his own way, and in a very rich world, while you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art.”  Sinister and disquieting that last phrase, and for those who see in impressionism the decadence of painting (because of the predominance given to the parts over the whole) it is a phrase prophetic.