s whose
illustration most intimately appeals to the less cultivated and more
rudimentary appreciation of fine art--as indisputably the Madonnas and
Charities and Oresteses and Bacchus Triumphs of M. Bouguereau do--one
may very well dispense himself from the duty of admiring its
productions. Life is short, and more important things, things of more
significant import, demand attention. The grounds on which the works of
Bouguereau and Cabanel are admired are certainly insufficient. But they
are experts in their sphere. What they do could hardly be better done.
If they appeal to a _bourgeois_, a philistine ideal of beauty, of
interest, they do it with a perfection that is pleasing in itself. No
one else does it half so well. To minds to which they appeal at all,
they appeal with the force of finality; for these they create as well as
illustrate the type of what is admirable and lovely. It is as easy to
account for their popularity as it is to perceive its transitory
quality. But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all interest
to such a work as, for example, M. Cabanel's "Birth of Venus," in the
painting of which a vast deal of technical expertness is enjoyably
evident, and which in every respect of motive and execution is far above
similar things done elsewhere than in France; it is a still greater
error to confound such painters as M. Cabanel and M. Bouguereau with
other painters whose classic temperament has been subjected to the
universal romantic influence equally with theirs, but whose production
is as different from theirs as is that of the thorough and pure
romanticists, the truly poetic painters.

The instinct of simplification is an intelligent and sound one. Its
satisfaction is a necessary preliminary to efficient action of any kind,
and indeed the basis of all fruitful philosophy. But in criticism this
instinct can only be satisfied intelligently and soundly by a
consideration of everything appealing to consideration, and not at all
by heated and wilful, or superior and supercilious, exclusions.
Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical felicity. To
follow the line of least resistance, not to take into account those
elements of a problem, those characteristics of a subject, to which,
superficially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to dispense
one's self from a great deal of particularly disagreeable industry, but
the result is only transitorily agreeable to the sincere intelligen