farther away from the phenomena which are the elements of his ensemble, farther than Claude, farther than anyone.  His touch is as light as the zephyr that stirs the diaphanous drapery of his trees.  Beside it Claude’s has a suspicion, at least, of unctuousness.  It has a pure, crisp, vibrant accent, quite without analogue in the technic of landscape painting.  Taking technic in its widest sense, one may speak of Corot’s shortcomings—­not, I think, of his failures.  It would be difficult to mention a modern painter more uniformly successful in attaining his aim, in expressing what he wishes to express, in conveying his impression, communicating his sensations.

That a painter of his power, a man of the very first rank, should have been content—­even placidly content—­to exercise it within a range by no means narrow, but plainly circumscribed, is certainly witness of limitation.  “Delacroix is an eagle, I am only a skylark,” he remarked once, with his characteristic cheeriness.  His range is not, it is true, as circumscribed as is generally supposed outside of France.  Outside of France his figure-painting, for example, is almost unknown.  We see chiefly variations of his green and gray arbored pastoral—­now idyllic, now heroic, now full of freshness, the skylark quality, now of grave and deep harmonies and wild, sweet notes of transitory suggestion.  Of his figures we only know those shifting shapes that blend in such classic and charming manner with the glades and groves of his landscapes.  Of his “Hagar in the Wilderness,” his “St. Jerome,” his “Flight into Egypt,” his “Democritus,” his “Baptism of Christ,” with its nine life-size figures, who, outside of France, has even heard?  How many foreigners know that he painted what are called architectural subjects delightfully, and even genre with zest?

But compared with his landscape, in which he is unique, it is plain that he excels nowhere else.  The splendid display of his works in the Centenaire Exposition of the great World’s Fair of 1889, was a revelation of his range of interest rather than of his range of power.  It was impossible not to perceive that, surprising as were his essays in other fields to those who only knew him as a landscape painter, he was essentially and integrally a painter of landscape, though a painter of landscape who had taken his subject in a way and treated it in a manner so personal as to be really unparalleled.  Outside of landscape his interest was clearly not real.  In his other works one notes a certain debonnaire irresponsibility.  He pursued nothing seriously but out-of-doors, its vaporous atmosphere, its crisp twigs and graceful branches, its misty distances and piquant accents, what Thoreau calls its inaudible panting.  His true theme, lightly as he took it, absorbed him; and no one of any sensitiveness can ever regret it.  His powers, following the indication of his true temperament, his most genuine inspiration, are concentrated upon the very finest thing imaginable in landscape painting; as, indeed, to produce as they have done the finest landscape in the history of art, they must have been.