re vigorously the sap that runs through and vivifies the various forms
of natural phenomena. To censure his shortcomings, to regret his
imaginative incompleteness, is to miss him altogether.

It is easy to say he had all the coarseness without the sentiment of the
French peasantry, whence he sprang; that his political radicalism
attests a lack of the serenity of spirit indispensable to the sincere
artist; that he had no conception of the beautiful, the exquisite--the
fact remains that he triumphs over all his deficiencies, and in very
splendid fashion. He is, in truth, of all the realists for whom he
discovered the way, and set the pace, as it were, one of the two
naturalistic painters who have shown in any high degree the supreme
artistic faculty--that of generalization. However impressive Manet's
picture may be; however brilliant Monet's endeavor to reproduce sunlight
may seem; however refined and elegant Degas's delicate selection of
pictorial material--for broad and masterful generalization, for enduing
what he painted with an interest deeper than its surface and underlying
its aspect, Courbet has but one rival among realistic painters. I mean,
of course, Bastien-Lepage.

There is an important difference between the two. In Courbet the
sentiment of reality dominates the realism of the technic; in
Bastien-Lepage the technic is realistically carried infinitely farther,
but the sentiment quite transcends realism. Imagine Courbet essaying a
"Jeanne d'Arc!" Bastien-Lepage painting Courbet's "Cantonniers" would
not have stopped, as Courbet has done, with expressing their vitality,
their actual interest, but at the same time that he represented them in
far greater technical completeness he would also have occupied himself
with their psychology. He is indeed quite as distinctly a psychologist
as he is a painter. His favorite problem, aside from that of technical
perfection, which perhaps equally haunted him, is the rendering of that
resigned, bewildered, semi-hypnotic, vaguely and yet intensely longing
spiritual expression to be noted by those who have the eyes to see it in
the faces and attitudes now of the peasant laborer, now of the city
pariah. All his peasant women are potentially Jeannes d'Arc--"Les
Foins," "Tired," "Petite Fauvette," for example. The "note" is still
more evident in the "London Bootblack" and the "London Flower-girl," in
which the outcast "East End" spiritlessness of the British capital is
caught and