rally supposed outside of France. Outside of
France his figure-painting, for example, is almost unknown. We see
chiefly variations of his green and gray arbored pastoral--now idyllic,
now heroic, now full of freshness, the skylark quality, now of grave and
deep harmonies and wild, sweet notes of transitory suggestion. Of his
figures we only know those shifting shapes that blend in such classic
and charming manner with the glades and groves of his landscapes. Of his
"Hagar in the Wilderness," his "St. Jerome," his "Flight into Egypt,"
his "Democritus," his "Baptism of Christ," with its nine life-size
figures, who, outside of France, has even heard? How many foreigners
know that he painted what are called architectural subjects
delightfully, and even _genre_ with zest?

But compared with his landscape, in which he is unique, it is plain that
he excels nowhere else. The splendid display of his works in the
Centenaire Exposition of the great World's Fair of 1889, was a
revelation of his range of interest rather than of his range of power.
It was impossible not to perceive that, surprising as were his essays in
other fields to those who only knew him as a landscape painter, he was
essentially and integrally a painter of landscape, though a painter of
landscape who had taken his subject in a way and treated it in a manner
so personal as to be really unparalleled. Outside of landscape his
interest was clearly not real. In his other works one notes a certain
_debonnaire_ irresponsibility. He pursued nothing seriously but
out-of-doors, its vaporous atmosphere, its crisp twigs and graceful
branches, its misty distances and piquant accents, what Thoreau calls
its inaudible panting. His true theme, lightly as he took it, absorbed
him; and no one of any sensitiveness can ever regret it. His powers,
following the indication of his true temperament, his most genuine
inspiration, are concentrated upon the very finest thing imaginable in
landscape painting; as, indeed, to produce as they have done the finest
landscape in the history of art, they must have been.

There are, however, two things worth noting in Corot's landscape, beyond
the mere fact that, better even than Rousseau, he expresses the essence
of landscape, dwells habitually among its inspirations, and is its
master rather than its servant. One is the way in which he poetizes, so
to speak, the simplest stretches of sward and clumps of trees, and long
clear vistas across stil