should have no subjects and that any interest in the subject is vulgar.  As he was a cosmopolitan with no local ties, he maintained that art had never been national; and as he was out of sympathy with his time, he taught that “art happens” and that “there never was an artistic period.”  According to the Whistlerian gospel, the artist not only has now no point of contact with the public, but he should not have and never has had any.  He has never been a man among other men, but has been a dreamer “who sat at home with the women” and made pretty patterns of line and color because they pleased him.  And the only business of the public is to accept “in silence” what he chooses to give them.

This kind of rootless art he practised.  Some of the patterns he produced are delightful, but they are without imagination, without passion, without joy in the material and visible world—­the dainty diversions of a dilettante.  One is glad that so gracefully slender an art should exist, but if it has seemed great art to us it is because our age is so poor in anything better.  To rank its creator with the abounding masters of the past is an absurdity.

In their efforts to escape from the dead-alive art of the salon picture, Monet and the Impressionists took an entirely different course.  The gallery painter’s perfunctory treatment of subject bored them, and they abandoned subject almost as entirely as Whistler had done.  The sound if tame drawing and the mediocre painting of what they called official art revolted them as it revolted Whistler; but while he nearly suppressed representation they could see in art nothing but representation.  They wanted to make that representation truer, and they tried to work a revolution in art by the scientific analysis of light and the invention of a new method of laying on paint.  Instead of joining in Whistler’s search for pure pattern they fixed their attention on facts alone, or rather on one aspect of the facts, and in their occupation with light and the manner of representing it they abandoned form almost as completely as they had abandoned significance and beauty.

So it happened that Monet could devote some twenty canvases to the study of the effects of light, at different hours of the day, upon two straw stacks in his farmyard.  It was admirable practice, no doubt, and neither scientific analysis nor the study of technical methods is to be despised; but the interest of the public, after all, is in what an artist does, not in how he learns to do it.  The twenty canvases together formed a sort of demonstration of the possibilities of different kinds of lighting.  Any one of them, taken singly, is but a portrait of two straw stacks, and the world will not permanently or deeply care about those straw stacks.  The study of light is, in itself, no more an exercise of the artistic faculties than the study of anatomy or the study of perspective; and while Impressionism has put a keener edge upon some of the tools of the artist, it has inevitably failed to produce a school of art.