or form, or other sensuous charm, which nevertheless are only subtly subordinated, and by no manner of means treated lightly or inadequately, is as exalted as any that has in our day been expressed in any manner.  Indeed, where, outside of the very highest poetry of the century, can one get the same sense of elation, of aspiring delight, of joy unmixed with regret—­since “the splendor of truth” which Plato defined beauty to be, is more animating and consoling than the “weary weight of all this unintelligible world,” is depressing to a spirit of lofty seriousness and sanity?

* * * * *

Dupre and Diaz are the decorative painters of the Fontainebleau group.  They are, of modern painters, perhaps the nearest in spirit to the old masters, pictorially speaking.  They are rarely in the grand style, though sometimes Dupre is restrained enough to emulate if not to achieve its sobriety.  But they have the bel air, and belong to the aristocracy of the painting world.  Diaz, especially, has almost invariably the patrician touch.  It lacks the exquisiteness of Monticelli’s, in which there is that curiously elevated detachment from the material and the real that the Italians—­and the Provencal painter’s inspiration and method, as well as his name and lineage, suggest an Italian rather than a French association—­exhibit far oftener than the French.  But Diaz has a larger sweep, a saner method.  He is never eccentric, and he has a dignity that is Iberian, though he is French rather than Spanish on his aesthetic side, and at times is as conservative as Rousseau—­without, however, reaching Rousseau’s lofty simplicity except in an occasional happy stroke.  Both he and Dupre are primarily colorists.  Dupre sees nature through a prism.  Diaz’s groups of dames and gallants have a jewel-like aspect; they leave the same impression as a tangle of ribbons, a bunch of exotic flowers, a heap of gems flung together with the felicity of haphazard.  In general, and when they are in most completely characteristic mood, it is not the sentiment of nature that one gets from the work of either painter.  It is not even their sentiment of nature—­the emotion aroused in their susceptibilities by natural phenomena.  What one gets is their personal feeling for color and design—­their decorative quality, in a word.

The decorative painter is he to whom what is called “subject,” even in its least restricted sense and with its least substantial suggestions, is comparatively indifferent.  Nature supplies him with objects; she is not in any intimate degree his subject.  She is the medium through which, rather than the material of which, he creates his effects.  It is her potentialities of color and design that he seeks, or at any rate, of all her infinitely numerous traits, it is her hues and arabesques that strike him most forcibly.  He is incurious as to her secrets and calls upon her aid to interpret his own, but he is so independent of her, if he be a decorative painter