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 Vétheuil (1881).
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, Théodore 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 Déjeuner 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.
Manet is a classic. His genuine power—technically speaking—lies in the broad, sabre-like strokes of his brush and not in the niggling taches of the impressionists—of which the reuctio ad absurdum is pointillisme. He lays on his pigments in sweeping slashes and his divisions are large. His significance for us does not alone reside in his consummate mastery of form and colour, but in his forthright expression of the life that hummed about him. He is as actual as Hals. Study that Boy With the Sword at the Metropolitan Museum—is there anything superficial about it? It is Spanish, the Spain of Velasquez, in its beautiful thin, clear, flat painting, its sober handling of values. The truth is that Manet dearly loved a fight, and being chef d'école, he naturally drifted to the impressionists' camp. And it is significant that Duret did not give this virile spirit a place in his new volume, confining the estimate of his genius to the preface. Mauclair, on the contrary, includes Manet's name in his more comprehensive and more scientific study, as he also includes the name of Edgar Degas—Degas, who is a latter-day Ingres, plus colour and a new psychology.
The title of impressionism has been a misleading one. If Degas is an impressionist, pray what then is Monet? Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne are impressionists, and in America there is no impropriety in attaching this handle to the works of Twachtmann, J. Alden Weir, W.L. Metcalf, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Robert Reid, Ernest Lawson, Paul Cornoyer, Colin Campbell Cooper, Prendergast, Luks, and Glackens. But Manet, Degas! It would have been a happier invention to have called the 1877 group independents; independent they were, each man pursuing his own rainbow. We may note an identical confusion in the mind of the public regarding the Barbizon school. Never was a group composed of such dissimilar spirits. Yet people talk about Millet and Breton, Corot and Daubigny, Rousseau and Dupré. They still say Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Mozart, Byron and Shelley. It is the result of mental inertia, this coupling of such widely disparate temperaments.
Nevertheless, divided tones and "screaming" palette do not always a picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells improvisation—an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process, facile as well as factitious. Albert Wolff must have thought these things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the painstaking Bonnat. Whistler shocked Ruskin when he confessed to having painted a nocturne in two days, but with a lifetime experience in each stroke of the brush. Whistler was a swift worker, and while he claimed the honour of being the originator of impressionism—didn't he "originate" Velasquez?—he really belongs to the preceding generation. He was impressionistic, if you will, yet not an impressionist. He was Japanese and Spanish, never Watteau, Monticelli, Turner, or Monet.
MacColl has pointed out the weakness of the scientific side of impressionism. Its values are strictly æsthetic; attempts to paint on a purely scientific basis have proved both monotonous and ludicrous. The experiments of the neo-impressionists (the 1885 group), of Signac, Seurat, were not very convincing. Van Rhysselberge, one of the few painters to-day who practise pointillisme, or the system of dots, is a gifted artist; so is Anquetin. The feminine group is headed by the name of Berthe Morisot (the wife of Eugène Manet, a brother of Edouard and the great granddaughter of Fragonard), a pupil of Manet, the most individual woman painter that ever lived; and Mary Cassatt, a pupil of Degas, though more closely allied to the open-air school in her methods. Miss Cassatt possesses a distinguished talent. As a school impressionism has run down to a thin rill in a waste of sand. It is more technical than personal, and while it was lucky to have such an exponent as Claude Monet, there is every reason to believe that Monet's impressionism is largely the result of a peculiar penetrating vision. He has been imitated, and Maufra and Moret are carrying on his tradition—yet there is but one Monet.
We know that the spectral palette is a mild delusion and sometimes a dangerous snare, that impressionism is in the remotest analysis but a new convention supplanting an old. Painters will never go back to the muddy palette of the past. The trick has been turned. The egg of Columbus has been once more stood on end. Claude Monet has taught us the "innocence of the eye," has shown us how to paint air that circulates, water that sparkles. The sun was the centre of the impressionistic attack, the "splendid, silent sun." A higher pitch in key colour has been attained, shadows have been endowed with vital hues. (And Leonardo da Vinci, wonderful landscapist, centuries ago wrote learnedly of coloured shadows; every new discovery is only a rediscovery.) The "dim, religious light" of the studio has been banished; the average palette is lighter, is more brilliant. And Rembrandt is still worshipped; Raphael is still on his pedestal, and the millionaire on the street continues to buy Bouguereau. The amateur who honestly wishes to purge his vision of encrusted painted prejudices we warn not to go too close to an impressionistic canvas—any more than he would go near a red-hot stove or a keg of gunpowder. And let him forget those toothsome critical terms, decomposition, recomposition. His eyes, if permitted, will act for themselves; there is no denying that the principles of impressionism soundly applied, especially to landscape, catch the fleeting, many-hued charm of nature. It is a system of coloured stenography—in the hands of a master. Woe betide the fumbler!
II - RENOIR
The secret of success is never to be satisfied; that is, never to be satisfied with your work or your success. And this idea seems to have animated Auguste Renoir during his long, honourable career of painter. In common with several members of the impressionistic group to which he belonged, he suffered from hunger, neglect, obloquy; but when prosperity did at last appear he did not succumb to the most dangerous enemy that besets the artist. He fought success as he conquered failure, and his continual dissatisfaction with himself, the true critical spirit, has led him to many fields—he has been portraitist, genre painter, landscapist, delineator of nudes, a marine painter and a master of still-life. This versatility, amazing and incontrovertible, has perhaps clouded the real worth of Renoir for the public. Even after acknowledging his indubitable gifts, the usual critical doubting Thomas grudgingly remarks that if Renoir could not draw like Degas, paint land and water like Monet or figures like Manet, he was a naturally endowed colourist. How great a colourist he was may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, where his big canvas, La Famille Charpentier, is now hung.