tic painters--like that of the realists in literature, where,
also, it need not be said, France has been in the lead--is measurably to
have got rid of solecisms; to have made, indeed, obvious solecisms, and
solecisms of conception as well as of execution, a little ridiculous. It
is, to be sure, equally ridiculous to subject romantic productions to
realistic standards, to blind one's self to the sentiment that saturates
such romantic works as Scott's and Dumas's, or Gericault's and Diaz's,
and is wholly apposite to its own time and point of view. The great
difficulty with a principle is that it is universal, and that when we
deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality is an impossible
ideal. Scott and Gericault are, nowadays, in what we have come to deem
essentials, distinctly old-fashioned. It might be well to try and
imitate them, if imitation had any salt in it, which it has not; or if
it were possible to do what they did with their different inspiration,
which it is not. Mr. Stevenson is, I think, an example of the danger of
essaying this latter in literature, just as a dozen eminent painters of
less talent--for no one has so much talent as Mr. Stevenson--are
examples in painting. But there are a thousand things, not only in the
technic of the romanticists but in their whole attitude toward their art
and their material, that are nowadays impossible to sincere and
spontaneous artists. Details which have no importance whatever in the
_ensemble_ of the romantic artist are essential to the realist. Art does
not stand still. Its canons change. There is a constant evolution in its
standards, its requirements. A conventional background is no more an
error in French classic painting than in tapestry; a perfunctory scheme
of pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz's splendid forest
landscapes; such phenomena in a work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would
jar, because, measured by the standards to which modern men must,
through the very force of evolution itself, subscribe, they can but
appear solecisms. In a different set of circumstances, under a different
inspiration, and with a different artistic attitude, solecisms they
certainly are not. But, as Thackeray makes Ethel Newcome say, "We belong
to our belongings." Our circumstances, inspiration, artistic attitude,
are involuntary and possess us as our other belongings do.

In Gautier's saying, for instance, "I am a man for whom the visible
world exists," which I hav