the great English painter.  Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave very well, and acknowledges that he effected a revolution in art, which revolution “consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens.”  “Mainly” is delightful, but Claude’s excellence consists in his ability to paint visions of loveliness, pictures of pure beauty, not in his skill in observing the drawing of wavelets or his happy thought of painting sunlight.  Mr. George Moore observes ironically of Mr. Ruskin that his grotesque depreciation of Mr. Whistler—­“the lot of critics” being “to be remembered by what they have failed to understand”—­“will survive his finest prose passage.”  I am not sure about Mr. Whistler.  Contemporaries are too near for a perfect critical perspective.  But assuredly Mr. Ruskin’s failure to perceive Claude’s point of view—­to perceive that Claude’s aim and Stanfield’s, say, were quite different; that Claude, in fact, was at the opposite pole from the botanist and the geologist whom Mr. Ruskin’s “reverence for nature” would make of every landscape painter—­is a failure in appreciation than to have shown which it would be better for him as a critic never to have been born.  It seems hardly fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a landscape painter himself, using the medium of words instead of pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.

“Go out, in the springtime, among the meadows that slope from the shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains.  There, mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths, beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom—­paths that forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with new-mown heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness—­look up toward the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines.”

Claude’s landscape is not Swiss, but if it were it would awaken in the beholder a very similar sensation to that aroused in the reader of this famous passage.  Claude indeed painted landscape in precisely this way.  He was perhaps the first—­though priority in such matters is trivial beside pre-eminence—­who painted effects instead of things.  Light and air were his material, not ponds and rocks and clouds and trees and stretches of plain and mountain outlines.  He first generalized the phenomena of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still unsurpassed.  But, superficially, his scheme wore the classic aspect, and neither his contemporaries nor his successors, for over two hundred years, discovered the immense value of his point of view, and the puissant charm of his way of rendering nature.