compositions. In admiration of these it is impossible for us nowadays to
go as far as even the romanticist, though extremely catholic, Gautier.
They leave us cold. We have a wholly different ideal, which in order to
interest us powerfully painting must illustrate--an ideal of more
pertinence and appositeness to our own moods and manner of thought and
feeling.

Ingres, a painter of considerably less force, I think, comes much nearer
to doing this. He is more elastic, less devoted to system. Without being
as free, as sensitive to impressions as we like to see an artist of his
powers, he escapes pedantry. His subject is not "The Rape of the
Sabines," but "The Apotheosis of Homer," academic but not academically
fatuitous. To follow the inspiration of the Vatican Stanze in the
selection and treatment of ideal subjects is to be far more closely in
touch with contemporary feeling as to what is legitimate and proper in
imaginative painting, than to pictorialize an actual event with a
systematic artificiality and conformity to abstractions that would
surely have made the sculptor of the Trajan column smile. Yet I would
rather have "The Rape of the Sabines" within visiting distance than "The
Apotheosis of Homer." It is better, at least solider, painting. The
painter, however dominated by his theory, is more the master of its
illustration than Ingres is of the justification of his admiration for
Raphael. The "Homer" attempts more, but it is naturally not as
successful in getting as effective a unity out of its greater
complexity. It is in his less ambitious pictures that the genius of
Ingres is unmistakably evident--his heads, his single figures, his
exquisite drawings almost in outline. His "Odalisque" of the Louvre is
not as forceful as David's portrait of Madame Recamier, but it is a
finer thing. I should like the two to have changed subjects in this
instance. His "Source" is beautifully drawn and modelled. In everything
he did distinction is apparent. Inferior assuredly to David when he
attempted the grand style, he had a truer feeling for the subtler
qualities of style itself. All his works are linearly beautiful
demonstrations of his sincerity--his sanity indeed--in proclaiming that
drawing is "the probity of art."

With a few contemporary painters and critics, whose specific penetration
is sometimes in curious contrast with their imperfect catholicity, he
has recently come into vogue again, after having been greatly neglec