ough in a different sense, his
powerful classic qualities will become most prominent in this ordeal,
and this classicism has never abandoned him in his audacities. To Degas
is due a new method of observation in drawing. He will have been the
first to study the relation between the moving lines of a living being
and the immovable lines of the scene which serves as its setting; the
first, also, to define drawing, not as a graphic science, but as the
valuation of the third dimension, and thus to apply to painting the
principles hitherto reserved for sculpture. Finally, he will be counted
among the great analysts. His vision, tenacious, intense, and sombre,
stimulates thought: across what appears to be the most immediate and
even the most vulgar reality it reaches a grand, artistic style; it
states profoundly the facts of life, it condenses a little the human
soul: and this will suffice to secure for Degas an important place in
his epoch, a little apart from Impressionism. Without noise, and through
the sheer charm of his originality, he has contributed his share towards
undermining the false doctrines of academic art before the painters, as
Manet has undermined them before the public.

[Illustration: CLAUDE MONET

AN INTERIOR, AFTER DINNER]

V

CLAUDE MONET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE

With Claude Monet we enter upon Impressionism in its most significant
technical expression, and touch upon the principal points referred to in
the second chapter of this book.

Claude Monet, the artistic descendant of Claude Lorrain, Turner, and
Monticelli, has had the merit and the originality of opening a new road
to landscape painting by deducing scientific statements from the study
of the laws of light. His work is a magnificent verification of the
optical discoveries made by Helmholtz and Chevreul. It is born
spontaneously from the artist's vision, and happens to be a rigorous
demonstration of principles which the painter has probably never cared
to know. Through the power of his faculties the artist has happened to
join hands with the scientist. His work supplies not only the very
basis of the Impressionist movement proper, but of all that has followed
it and will follow it in the study of the so-called chromatic laws. It
will serve to give, so to say, a mathematic necessity to the happy finds
met by the artists hitherto, and it will also serve to endow decorative
art and mural painting with a process, the applications of w