The romantic painters were, however, by no means merely emotional.  They were mainly imaginative.  And in painting, as in literature, the great change wrought by romanticism consisted in stimulating the imagination instead of merely satisfying the sense and the intellect.  The main idea ceased to be as obviously accentuated, and its natural surroundings were given their natural place; there was less direct statement and more suggestion; the artist’s effort was expended rather upon perfecting the ensemble, noting relations, taking in a larger circle; a suggested complexity of moral elements took the place of the old simplicity, whose multifariousness was almost wholly pictorial.  Instead of a landscape as a tapestry background to a Holy Family, and having no pertinence but an artistic one, we have Corot’s “Orpheus.”

II

Gericault and Delacroix are the great names inscribed at the head of the romantic roll.  They will remain there.  And the distinction is theirs not as awarded by the historical estimate; it is personal.  In the case of Gericault perhaps one thinks a little of “the man and the moment” theory.  He was, it is true, the first romantic painter—­at any rate the first notable romantic painter.  His struggles, his steadfastness, his success—­pathetically posthumous—­have given him an honorable eminence.  His example of force and freedom exerted an influence that has been traced not only in the work of Delacroix, his immediate inheritor, but in that of the sculptor Rude, and even as far as that of Millet—­to all outward appearance so different in inspiration from that of his own tumultuous and dramatic genius.  And as of late years we look on the stages of any evolution as less dependent on individuals than we used to, doubtless just as Luther was confirmed and supported on his way to the Council at Worms by the people calling on him from the house-tops not to deny the truth, Gericault was sustained and stimulated in the face of official obloquy by a more or less considerable aesthetic movement of which he was really but the leader and exponent.  But his fame is not dependent upon his revolt against the Institute, his influence upon his successors, or his incarnation of an aesthetic movement.  It rests on his individual accomplishment, his personal value, the abiding interest of his pictures.  “The Raft of the Medusa” will remain an admirable and moving creation, a masterpiece of dramatic vigor and vivid characterization, of wide and deep human interest and truly panoramic grandeur, long after its contemporary interest and historic importance have ceased to be thought of except by the aesthetic antiquarian.  “The Wounded Cuirassier” and the “Chasseur of the Guard” are not documents of aesthetic history, but noble expressions of artistic sapience and personal feeling.