fixes the
character of the French painting of the present day.

Had Regnault lived, he would have more adequately--or should I say more
plausibly?--marked the transition from romanticism to realism.
Temperamentally he was clearly a thorough romanticist--far more so, for
instance, than his friend Fortuny, whose intellectual reserve is always
conspicuous. He essayed the most vehement kind of subjects, even in the
classical field, where he treated them with truly romantic truculence.
He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature
as a fairy-story teller. In this sense he was more romantic than the
romanticists. His "Automedon," his portrait of General Prim, even his
"Salome," are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial,
as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic _a outrance_. At
the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their
significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed to him. He was
farther away from the classic inspiration than any other romanticist of
his fellows; and at the same time he cared for the external world more
on its own account and less for its suggestions, than any painter of
equal force before Courbet and Bastien-Lepage. The very fact that he was
not, intellectually speaking, wholly _dans son assiette_, as the French
say, shows that he was a genius of a transitional moment. One's final
thought of him is that he died young, and one thinks so not so much
because of the dramatic tragedy of his taking off by possibly the last
Prussian bullet fired in the war of 1870-71, as because of the
essentially experimental character of his painting. Undoubtedly he would
have done great things. And undoubtedly they would have been different
from those that he did; probably in the direction--already indicated in
his most dignified performance--of giving more consistency, more vivid
definiteness, more reality, even, to his already striking conceptions.

III

REALISTIC PAINTING

I

To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own time must, I think,
be more interesting than any other. The sentimental, the scholastic, the
speculative temperament may look before or after with longing or regret;
but that sanity of mind which is practical and productive must find its
most agreeable sensations in the data to which it is intimately and
inexorably related. The light upon Greek literature and art for which we
study Greek h