l. His
impulse is as genuine and spontaneous as if the substance upon which it
is exercised were not the acme of the exotic, and already arranged with
the most elaborate conventionality. Nothing indeed could be more opposed
to the elementary crudity of impressionism than his distinction and
refinement, which may be said to be carried to a really _fin de siecle_
degree.

VIII

Whatever the painting of the future is to be, it is certain not to be
the painting of Monet. For the present, no doubt, Monet is the last word
in painting. To belittle him is not only whimsical, but ridiculous. He
has plainly worked a revolution in his art. He has taken it out of the
vicious circle of conformity to, departure from, and return to
abstractions and the so-called ideal. No one hereafter who attempts the
representation of nature--and for as far ahead as we can see with any
confidence, the representation of nature, the pantheistic ideal if one
chooses, will increasingly intrench itself as the painter's true aim--no
one who seriously attempts to realize this aim of now universal appeal
will be able to dispense with Monet's aid. He must perforce follow the
lines laid down for him by this astonishing naturalist. Any other course
must result in solecism, and if anything future is certain, it is
certain that the future will be not only inhospitable to, but absolutely
intolerant of, solecism. Henceforth the basis of things is bound to be
solid and not superficial, real and not fantastic. But--whether the
future is to commit itself wholly to prose, or is to preserve in new
conditions the essence of the poetry that, in one form or another, has
persisted since plastic art began--for the superstructure to be erected
on the sound basis of just values and true impressions it is justifiably
easy to predict a greater interest and a more real dignity than any such
preoccupation with the basis of technic as Monet's can possibly have.
And though, even as one says it, one has the feeling that the future is
pregnant with some genius who will out-Monet Monet, and that painting
will in some now inconceivable way have to submit hereafter to a still
more rigorous standard than it does at present--I have heard the claims
of binocular vision urged--at the same time the true "child of nature"
may console himself with the reflection that accuracy and competence are
but the accidents, at most the necessary phenomena, of what really and
essentially constitutes f