r every
educated and intelligent person, in spite of his literalness and his
insensitiveness to the element of beauty, and indeed to any truly
pictorial significance whatever in the wide range of subjects that he
essayed, with, in an honorable sense, such distinguished success.

Especially in America, I think, where of recent years we have shown an
Athenian sensitiveness to new impressions, the direct descendants of the
classic period of French painting have suffered from the popularity of
the Fontainebleau group. Their legitimate attachment to art, instead of
the Fontainebleau absorption in nature, has given them a false
reputation of artificiality. But the prose element in art has its
justification as well as the poetic, and it is witness of a narrow
culture to fail in appreciation of its admirable accomplishment. The
academic wing of the French romantic painting is marked precisely by a
breadth of culture that is itself a source of agreeable and elevated
interest. The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated. They lack the
picturesque and unexpected note of their poetic brethren--they lack the
moving and interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of these;
nay, they lack the penetrating distinction that radiates even from
rusticity itself when it is inspired and transfigured as it appears in
such works as those of Millet and Rousseau. But their distinction is not
less real for being the distinction of cultivation rather than
altogether native and absolute. It is perhaps even more marked, more
pervasive, more directly associated with the painter's aim and effect.
One feels that they are familiar with the philosophy of art, its history
and practice, that they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less
personal and powerful their horizon is less limited, their purely
intellectual range, at all events, and in many cases their aesthetic
interest, wider. They have more the cultivated man's bent for
experimentation, for variety. They care more scrupulously for
perfection, for form. With a far inferior sense of reality and far less
felicity in dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with the
abstractions of art is more salient. To be blind to their successful
handling of line and mass and movement, is to neglect a source of
refined pleasure. To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their
admirable rhetoric; to regret their imperfect feeling for decorativeness
is to miss their delightful decorum.

V