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