sily to make skies effective, and perhaps it is not
fanciful to note the frequency of high horizons in his work.

The fact remains that Bastien-Lepage stands at the head of the modern
movement in many ways. His friend, M. Andre Theuriet, has shown, in a
brochure published some years ago, that he was himself as interesting as
his pictures. He took his art very seriously, and spoke of it with a
dignity rather uncommon in the atmosphere of the studios, where there is
apt to be more enthusiasm than reflection. I recall vividly the
impatience with which he once spoke to me of painting "to show what you
can do." His own standard was always the particular ideal he had formed,
never within the reach of his ascertained powers. And whatever he did,
one may say, illustrates the sincerity and elevation of this remark,
whether one's mood incline one to care most for this psychological
side--undoubtedly the more nearly unique side--of his work, or for such
exquisite things as his "Forge" or the portrait of Mme Sarah Bernhardt.
Incontestably he has the true tradition, and stands in the line of the
great painters. And he owes his permanent place among them not less to
his perception that painting has a moral and significant, as well as a
representative and decorative sanction, than to his perfect harmony with
his own time in his way of illustrating this--to his happy fusion of
aspect admirably rendered with profound and stimulating suggestion.

III

Of the realistic landscape painters, the strict impressionists apart,
none is more eminent than M. Cazin, whose work is full of interest, and
if at times it leaves one a little cold, this is perhaps an affair of
the beholder's temperament rather than of M. Cazin's. He is a thoroughly
original painter, and, what is more at the present day, an imaginative
one. He sees in his own way the nature that we all see, and paints it
not literally but personally. But his landscapes invariably attest,
above all, an attentive study of the phenomena of light and air, and
their truthfulness is the more marked for the personality they
illustrate. The impression they make is of a very clairvoyant and
enthusiastic observation exercised by an artist who takes more pleasure
in appreciation than in expression, whose pleasure in his expression is
subordinate to his interest in the external world, and in large measure
confined to the delight every artist has in technical felicity when he
can attain it. Their s