of Christ” are admirable only from the academic point of view.  Delaroche’s “Hemicycle” and his many historical tableaux are surely in the classic vein, however free they may seem in subject and treatment by contrast with the works of David and Ingres.  They leave us equally cold, at all events, and in the same way—­for the same reason.  They betray the painter’s preoccupation with art rather than with nature.  They do, in truth, differ widely from the works which they succeeded, but the difference is not temperamental.  They suggest the French phrase, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.  Gerome, for example, feels the exhilaration of the free air of romanticism fanning his enthusiasm.  He does not confine himself, as, born a decade or two earlier, certainly he would have done, to classic subject.  He follows Decamps and Marilhat to the Orient, which he paints with the utmost freedom, so far as the choice of theme is concerned—­descending even to the danse du ventre of a Turkish cafe.  He paints historical pictures with a realism unknown before his day.  He is almost equally famous in the higher class of genre subjects.  But throughout everything he does it is easy to perceive the academic point of view, the classic temperament.  David assuredly would never have chosen one of Gerome’s themes; but had he chosen it, he would have treated it in much the same way.  Allowance made for the difference in time, in general feeling of the aesthetic environment, the change in ideas as to what was fit subject for representation and fitting manner of treating the same subject, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Ingres would have sincerely applauded Gerome’s “Cleopatra” issuing from the carpet roll before Caesar.  And if he failed to perceive the noble dramatic power in such a work as the “Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant,” his failure would nowadays, at least among intelligent amateurs, be ascribed to an intolerance which it is one of the chief merits of the romantic movement to have adjudged absurd.

It is a source of really aesthetic satisfaction to see everything that is attempted as well done as it is in the works of such painters as Bouguereau and Cabanel.  Of course the feeling that denies them large importance is a legitimate one.  The very excellence of their technic, its perfect adaptedness to the motive it expresses, is, considering the insignificance of the motive, subject for criticism; inevitably it partakes of the futility of its subject-matter.  Of course the personal value of the man, the mind, behind any plastic expression is, in a sense, the measure of the expression itself.  If it be a mind interested in “pouncet-box” covers, in the pictorial setting forth of themes whose illustration most intimately appeals to the less cultivated and more rudimentary appreciation of fine art—­as indisputably the Madonnas and Charities and Oresteses and Bacchus Triumphs of M. Bouguereau do—­one may very well dispense himself from the duty of admiring