but it is apparently that of nature herself as well as his own.  It is not the less personal for this.  On the contrary, it is extremely personal, and few pictures are as individual, as characteristic.  Occasionally Diaz approaches him, as I have said, but only in the very happiest and exceptional moments, when the dignity of nature as well as her charm seems specially to impress and impose itself upon the less serious painter.  But Rousseau’s selection seems instinctive and not sought out.  He knows the secret of nature’s pictorial element.  He is at one with her, adopts her suggestions so cordially and works them out with such intimate sympathy and harmoniousness, that the two forces seem reciprocally to reinforce each other, and the result gains many fold in power from their subtle co-operation.  His landscapes have in this way a Wordsworthian directness, simplicity, and severity.  They are not troubled and dramatic like Turner’s.  They are not decorative like Dupre’s, they have not the solemn sentiment of Daubigny’s, or the airy aspiration and fairy-like blitheness of Corot’s.  But there is in them “all breathing human passion;” and at times, as in “Le Givre,” they rise to majesty and real grandeur because they are impregnated with the sentiment, as well as are records of the phenomena, of nature, and one may say of Rousseau, paraphrasing Mr. Arnold’s remark about Wordsworth, that nature seems herself to take the brush out of his hand and to paint for him “with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.”  Rousseau, however, is French, and in virtue of his nativity exhibits always what Wordsworth’s treatment of nature exhibits only occasionally, namely, the Gallic gift of style.  It is rarely as felicitous as in Corot, in every detail of whose every work, one may almost say, its informing, co-ordinating, elevating influence is distinctly to be perceived; but it is always present as a factor, as a force dignifying and relieving from all touch, all taint of the commonness that is so often inseparably associated with art whose absorption in nature is listlessly unthinking instead of enthusiastic and alert.  In Rousseau, too, in a word, we have the classic strain, as at least a psychological element, and note as one source of his power his reserve and restraint, his perfect self-possession.

In Daubigny a similar attitude toward nature is obvious, but with a sensible difference.  Affection for, rather than absorption in her, is his inspiration.  Daubigny stands somewhat apart from the Fontainebleau group, with whom nevertheless he is popularly and properly associated, for though he painted Normandy mainly, he was spiritually of the Barbizon kindred.  He stands, however, somewhat apart from French painting in general, I think.  There is less style, more sentiment, more poetry in his landscapes than in those of his countrymen who are to be compared with him.  Beyond what is admirable in them there is something attaching as well.  He drew and engraved a good