those elements greater than they that wield a fatal
power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last of that great
school of impressive artistry, as he was the first of our real
painters and the greatest in vision. He was a still companion of Blake
in that realm of the beyond, the first citizen of the land of Luthany.
He knew the fine distinction between drama and tragedy, the tragedy
which nature prevails upon the sensitive to accept. He was the painter
poet of the immanent in things.

WINSLOW HOMER

In Winslow Homer we have yankeeism of the first order, turned to a
creditable artistic account. With a fierce feeling for truth, a mania,
almost, for actualities, there must have been somewhere in his make-up
a gentleness, a tenderness and refinement which explain his fine
appreciation of the genius of the place he had in mind to represent.
There is not an atom of legend in Homer, it is always and always
narrative of the obvious world. There is at once the essential
dramatic import ruling the scene. With him it is nothing but dramatic
relationship, the actionary tendency of the facts themselves, in
nature. You are held by him constantly to the bold and naked theme,
and you are left to wander in the imagination only among the
essentials of simple and common realism.

Narrative then, first and last with Homer, and the only creative
aspect of his pictures is concealed in the technique. The only touch
of invention in them is the desire to improve the language they speak.
Dramatic always, I do not call them theatric excepting in the case of
one picture that I know, called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the
Metropolitan Museum, reminding me much of the commonplace, "Chateau de
Chillon" of Courbet's, neither of these pictures being of any value
in the careers of their authors. But once you sat on the rocks of
Maine, and watched the climbing of the surf up the morning sky after a
heavy storm at sea, you realize the force of Homer's gift for the
realities. His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a work of
art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute as is the yankee nature
itself, or rather to say, the original yankee, which was pioneer then
in a so rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of Thoreau,
but without the genius of Thoreau for the poetry of things.

Homer's pictures give you nothing but the bare fact told in the better
class terms of illustration, for he was illustrator, first of all.