nothing whatever in common with the art of Corot. True, that Corot's
aim was to render his impression of his subject, no matter whether it
was a landscape or a figure; in this aim he differed in no wise from
Giotto and Van Eyck; but we are not considering Corot's aims but his
means of expression, and his means of expression were the very
opposite to those employed by Monet and the school of Monet. Not with
half-tints in which colour disappears are Monet and his school
concerned, but with the brilliant vibration of colour in the full
light, with open spaces where the light is reflected back and forward,
and nature is but a prism filled with dazzling and iridescent tints.

I remember once writing about one of Monet's innumerable snow effects:
"This picture is in his most radiant manner. A line of snow-enchanted
architecture passes through the picture--only poor houses with a
single square church tower, but they are beautiful as Greek temples in
the supernatural whiteness of the great immaculate snow. Below the
village, but not quite in the foreground, a few yellow bushes, bare
and crippled by the frost, and around and above a marvellous glitter
in pale blue and pale rose tints." I asked if the touch was not more
precious than intimate; and I spoke, too, of a shallow and brilliant
appearance. But if I had asked why the picture, notwithstanding its
incontestable merits, was so much on the surface, why it so
irresistibly suggested _un decor de theatre_, why one did not enter
into it as one does into a picture by Wilson or Corot, my criticism
would have gone to the root of the evil. And the reason of this is
because Monet has never known how to organise and control his values.
The relation of a wall to the sky which he observes so finely seem as
if deliberately contrived for the suppression of all atmosphere; and
we miss in Monet the delicacy and the mystery which are the charm of
Corot. The bath of air being withdrawn, a landscape becomes a mosaic,