e quoted as expressing the key-note of the
romantic epoch, it is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a
spectacle simply--significant, suggestive or merely stimulant, in
accordance with individual bent. Gautier and the romanticists generally
had little concern for its structure. To many of them it was indeed
rather a canvas than a spectacle even--just as to many, if not to most,
of the realists it is its structure rather than its significance that
altogether appeals; the romanticists in general sketched their ideas and
impressions upon it, as the naturalists have in the main studied its
aspects and constitution, careless of the import of these, pictorially
or otherwise. Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why
so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import?
Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of
"documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy,
comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's
"Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps. But what is
indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present
general aesthetic attitude and inspiration, and must share not only the
romanticists' impatience with academic formulae and conventions, but the
realists' devotion to life and the world as they actually exist. The
future may be different, but we are living in the present, and what is
important is, after all, to live. It is also so difficult that not to
take the line of least resistance is fatuity.

II

It is at least an approximation to ascribe the primacy of realism to
Courbet, though ascriptions of the kind are at best approximations. Not
only was he the first, or among the first, to feel the interest and
importance of the actual world as it is and for what it is rather than
for what it suggests, but his feeling in this direction is intenser than
that of anyone else. Manet was preoccupied with the values of objects
and spaces. Bastien-Lepage, while painting these with the most
scrupulous fidelity, was nevertheless always attentive to the
significance and import of what he painted. Courbet was a pure
pantheist. He was possessed by the material, the physical, the actual.
He never varies it a hair's-breadth. He never lifts it a fraction of a
degree. But by his very absorption in it he dignifies it immensely. He
illustrates magnificently its possibilities. He brings out into the
plaine