laude's alchemy with lovelier results
than any other painter--save always Corot, shall I say?--has ever
achieved. Witness the pastorals at Madrid, in the Doria Gallery at Rome,
the "Dido and AEneas" at Dresden, the sweet and serene superiority of the
National Gallery canvases over the struggling competition manifest in
the Turners juxtaposed to them through the unlucky ambition of the great
English painter. Mr. Ruskin says that Claude could paint a small wave
very well, and acknowledges that he effected a revolution in art, which
revolution "consisted mainly in setting the sun in heavens." "Mainly" is
delightful, but Claude's excellence consists in his ability to paint
visions of loveliness, pictures of pure beauty, not in his skill in
observing the drawing of wavelets or his happy thought of painting
sunlight. Mr. George Moore observes ironically of Mr. Ruskin that his
grotesque depreciation of Mr. Whistler--"the lot of critics" being "to
be remembered by what they have failed to understand"--"will survive his
finest prose passage." I am not sure about Mr. Whistler. Contemporaries
are too near for a perfect critical perspective. But assuredly Mr.
Ruskin's failure to perceive Claude's point of view--to perceive that
Claude's aim and Stanfield's, say, were quite different; that Claude, in
fact, was at the opposite pole from the botanist and the geologist whom
Mr. Ruskin's "reverence for nature" would make of every landscape
painter--is a failure in appreciation than to have shown which it would
be better for him as a critic never to have been born. It seems hardly
fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a
landscape painter himself, using the medium of words instead of
pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.

"Go out, in the springtime, among the meadows that slope from the
shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There,
mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass
grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths,
beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom--paths that
forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in
scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with
new-mown heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness--look up toward
the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently
into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines."

Cla