gray and rose, for, like M. Worth the man-milliner, it pleases his fancy
to attempt the reconciliation of the most inimical colors. For the rest,
the future will no doubt owe him a debt of gratitude for the precious
evidence which his pictures will furnish of the dress of the period.
Indeed, without the help of certain of our portrait-painters future
investigators would find themselves sadly at a loss in reconstructing
the Paris of Napoleon III. and of the Third Republic. We are so much
under the influence of the past that our artists scarcely have the
sentiment of the civilization which surrounds them. Our colleges send us
into the world, not Frenchmen, but Greeks and Romans, knowing nothing of
modern life, and inspired by our classical studies with a profound
contempt for the manners and usages of the present day. Our statues,
bas-reliefs, medals and pictures represent the events of all ages except
our own. The attempts in the direction of realism of these latest days,
the paintings of Courbet and Manet, seem, by a sort of instinctive
preference, to seek out the _ugly_, rather than to give us an exact
reproduction of contemporaneous Nature. Some of our genre
painters--Millet, for example, and Jules Breton--have, it is true,
studied the actual and the modern, but their types are all taken from
the rustic class, and it is safe to say that outside of portraiture
neither the men nor the women of the world will leave a trace upon the
art of the period.

Let us note, however, one exception to this statement. I refer to
certain painters of military scenes who have chosen to call up the
spectre of the Franco-German war--Edouard Detaille, Neuville, Boulanger.
These have ventured to depict one side of modern life--and an important
one, alas!--modern warfare, not by showing us those episodes of
classical combat where half a dozen cavaliers, mounted upon their heavy
historical horses, fight hand to hand for the possession of a flag, and
trample under foot a wounded wretch whose very _pose_ is traditional,
but by giving us actual scenes witnessed during the autumn of 1870 and
the winter of 1871--scenes often frightful, but always grandly effective
and worthy of art. A sentiment of diplomatic propriety, with which the
Germans were but little troubled at Philadelphia, has naturally kept
these paintings out of the Champ de Mars, and banished them to Goupil's
in the Rue Chaptal. We certainly do not complain of this, but we cannot
hel