esoteric note dear to the English
pre-Raphaelites. It attests a delight in color, not a fondness for
certain colors, hues, tints--a difference perfectly appreciable to
either an unsophisticated or an educated sense. It has a solidity and
strength of range and vibration combined with a subtle sensitiveness,
and, as a result of the fusion of the two, a certain splendor that
recalls Saracenic decoration. And with this mastery of color is united a
combined firmness and expressiveness of design that makes Delacroix
unique by emphasizing his truly classic subordination of informing
enthusiasm to a severe and clearly perceived ideal--an ideal in a sense
exterior to his purely personal expression. In a word, his chief
characteristic--and it is a supremely significant trait in the
representative painter of romanticism--is a poetic imagination tempered
and trained by culture and refinement. When his audacities and
enthusiasms are thought of, the directions in his will for his tomb
should be remembered too: "Il n'y sera place ni embleme, ni buste, ni
statue; mon tombeau sera copie tres exactement sur l'antique, ou
Vignoles ou Palladio, avec des saillies tres prononcees, contrairement a
tout ce qui se fait aujourd'hui en architecture." "Let there be neither
emblem, bust, nor statue on my tomb, which shall be copied very
scrupulously after the antique, either Vignola or Palladio, with
prominent projections, contrary to everything done to-day in
architecture." In a sense all Delacroix is in these words.

III

Delacroix's color deepens into an almost musical intensity occasionally
in Decamps, whose oriental landscapes and figures, far less important
intellectually, far less _magistrales_ in conception, have at times, one
may say perhaps without being too fanciful, a truly symphonic quality
that renders them unique. "The Suicide" is like a chord on a violin. But
it is when we come to speak of the "Fontainebleau Group," in especial, I
think, that the aesthetic susceptibility characteristic of the latter
half of the nineteenth century feels, to borrow M. Taine's introduction
to his lectures on "The Ideal in Art," that the subject is one only to
be treated in poetry.

Of the noblest of all so-called "schools," Millet is perhaps the most
popular member. His popularity is in great part, certainly, due to his
literary side, to the sentiment which pervades, which drenches, one may
say, all his later work--his work after he had, on overhe