st possible view its inherent, integral, aesthetic quality,
independent of any extraneity. No painter ever succeeded so well with so
little art, one is tempted to say. Beside his, the love of nature which
we ascribe to the ordinary realist is a superficial emotion. He had the
_sentiment_ of reality in the highest degree; he had it intensely. If he
did not represent nature with the searching subtlety of later painters,
he is certainly the forerunner of naturalism. He has absolutely no
ideality. He is blind to all intimations of immortality, all unearthly
voices.

Yet it would be wholly an error to suppose him a mere literalist. No one
is farther removed from the painstaking, grubbing imitators of detail so
justly denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Whistler. He has the generalizing
faculty in very distinguished degree, and in very large measure. Every
trait of his talent, indeed, is large, manly; but for a certain
qualification--which must be made--one might add, Olympian. This
qualification perhaps may be not unfairly described as earthiness--never
an agreeable trait, and one to which probably is due the depreciation of
Courbet that is so popular even among appreciative critics. It is easy
to characterize Courbet as brutal and material, but what is easy is
generally not exact. What one glibly stigmatizes as brutality and
grossness may, after all, be something of a particularly strong savor,
enjoyed by the painter himself with a gusto too sterling and instinctive
to be justifiably neglected, much less contemned. The first thing to do
in estimating an artist's accomplishment, which is to place one's self
at his point of view, is, in Courbet's case, unusually difficult. We are
all dreamers, more or less--in more or less desultory fashion--and can
all appreciate that prismatic turn of what is real and actual into a
position wherein it catches glints of the imagination. The imagination
is a universal touchstone. The sense of reality is a special, an
individual faculty. When one is poetizing in an amateur, a dilettante
way, as most of us poetize, a picture of Courbet, which seems to flaunt
and challenge the imagination in virtue of its defiant reality, its
insistence on the value and significance of the prosaic and the actual,
appears coarse and crude. It is not, however. It is very far from that.
It is rather elemental than elementary--in itself a prodigious
distinction. No modern painter has felt more intensely and reproduced
mo