fixed with a Zola-like veracity and vigor. Such a phase as
this is not so much pictorial or poetic, as psychological.
Bastien-Lepage's happiness in rendering it is a proof of the exceeding
quickness and sureness of his observation; but his preoccupation with it
is equally strong proof of his interest in the things of the mind as
well as in those of the senses. This is his great distinction, I think.
He beats the realist on his own ground (except perhaps Monet and his
followers--I remember no attempt of his to paint sunlight), but he is
imaginative as well. He is not, on the other hand, to be in anywise
associated with the romanticists. Degas's acid characterization of him,
as "the Bouguereau of the modern movement," is only just, if we remember
what very radical and fundamental changes the "modern movement" implies
in general attitude as well as in special expression. I should be
inclined, rather, to apply the analogy to M. Dagnan-Bouveret, though
here, too, with many reserves looking mainly to the difference between
true and vapid sentiment.

It is interesting to note, however, the almost exclusively intellectual
character of this imaginative side of Bastien-Lepage. He does not view
his material with any apparent sympathy, such as one notes, or at all
events divines, in Millet. Both were French peasants; but whereas
Millet's interest in his fellows is instinctive and absorbing,
Bastien-Lepage's is curious and detached. If his pictures ever succeed
in moving us, it is impersonally, in virtue of the camera-like scrutiny
he brings to bear on his subject, and the effectiveness with which he
renders it, and of the reflections which we institute of ourselves, and
which he fails to stimulate by even the faintest trace of a loving touch
or the betrayal of any sympathetic losing of himself in his theme. You
feel just the least intimation of the _doctrinaire_, the systematic
aloofness of the spectator. In moral attitude as well as in technical
expression he no more assimilates the various phases of his material, to
reproduce them afterward in new and original combination, than he
expresses the essence of landscape in general, as the Fontainebleau
painters do even in their most photographic moments. Both his figures
and his landscapes are clearly portraits--typical and not merely
individual, to be sure, but somehow not exactly creations. His skies are
the least successful portions of his pictures, I think; one must
generalize ea