eved a fine
mastery in it. His imitators will never arrive at his severity because
they are not flint yankee. They have not the hard head and snappy
tongue. It was yankee crabbedness that gave Homer his grip on the idea
he had in mind. Florida lent a softer tone to what Maine rocks could
not give him. He is American from skin to skeleton, and a leader among
yankee as well as American geniuses. He probably hated as much as
Thoreau, and in his steely way admired as much. It was fire from the
flintlock in them both, though nature had a far softer and loftier
persuasion with the Concord philosopher and naturalist.

Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for
reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the
essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a
little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense
of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic
incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon
integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself.
It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and
typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determination. Homer
has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in
world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field.
His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact,
dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen
these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may
want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in
their living appreciation of reality.

He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from
accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe
to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most
impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express
philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is
to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and
last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding
school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the
ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the
stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught
him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique.
And at the same time he rose a plac