all hours of the day. This is the
principle whose results are the great divisions of his work which might
be called "Investigation of the variations of sunlight." The most famous
of these series are the _Hay-ricks_, the _Poplars_, the _Cliffs of
Etretat_, the _Golfe Juan_, the _Coins de Riviere_, the _Cathedrals_,
the _Water-lilies_, and finally the _Thames_ series which Monet is at
present engaged upon. They are like great poems, and the splendour of
the chosen theme, the orchestration of the shivers of brightness, the
symphonic _parti-pris_ of the colours, make their realism, the minute
contemplation of reality, approach idealism and lyric dreaming.

Monet paints these series from nature. He is said to take with him in a
carriage at sunrise some twenty canvases which he changes from hour to
hour, taking them up again the next day. He notes, for example, from
nine to ten o'clock the most subtle effects of sunlight upon a hay-rick;
at ten o'clock he passes on to another canvas and recommences the study
until eleven o'clock. Thus he follows step by step the modifications of
the atmosphere until nightfall, and finishes simultaneously the works of
the whole series. He has painted a hay-stack in a field twenty times
over, and the twenty hay-stacks are all different. He exhibits them
together, and one can follow, led by the magic of his brush, the history
of light playing upon one and the same object. It is a dazzling display
of luminous atoms, a kind of pantheistic evocation. Light is certainly
the essential personage who devours the outlines of the objects, and is
thrown like a translucent veil between our eyes and matter. One can see
the vibrations of the waves of the solar spectrum, drawn by the
arabesque of the spots of the seven prismatic hues juxtaposed with
infinite subtlety; and this vibration is that of heat, of atmospheric
vitality. The silhouettes melt into the sky; the shadows are lights
where certain tones, the blue, the purple, the green and the orange,
predominate, and it is the proportional quantity of the spots that
differentiates in our eyes the shadows from what we call the lights,
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 t