just as it actually happens in optic science. There are some midday
scenes by Claude Monet, where every material silhouette--tree, hay-rick,
or rock--is annihilated, volatilised in the fiery vibration of the dust
of sunlight, and before which the beholder gets really blinded, just as
he would in actual sunlight. Sometimes even there are no more shadows at
all, nothing that could serve to indicate the values and to create
contrasts of colours. Everything is light, and the painter seems easily
to overcome those terrible difficulties, lights upon lights, thanks to a
gift of marvellous subtlety of sight.

[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET

THE CHURCH AT VARENGEVILLE]

Generally he finds a very simple _motif_ sufficient; a hay-rick, some
slender trunks rising skywards, or a cluster of shrubs. But he also
proves himself as powerful draughtsman when he attacks themes of greater
complexity. Nobody knows as he does how to place a rock amidst
tumultuous waves, how to make one understand the enormous construction
of a cliff which fills the whole canvas, how to give the sensation of a
cluster of pines bent by the wind, how to throw a bridge across a river,
or how to express the massiveness of the soil under a summer sun. All
this is constructed with breadth, truth and force under the delicious or
fiery symphony of the luminous atoms. The most unexpected tones play in
the foliage. On close inspection we are astonished to find it striped
with orange, red, blue and yellow touches, but seen at a certain
distance the freshness of the green foliage appears to be represented
with infallible truth. The eye recomposes what the brush has
dissociated, and one finds oneself perplexed at all the science, all the
secret order which has presided over this accumulation of spots which