It is temptingly simple to deny all importance to painters who are not poetic painters.  And the temptation is especially seductive when the prosaic painters are paralleled by such a distinguished succession of their truly poetic brethren as are the painters of the romantic epoch who are possessed of the classic temperament.  But real criticism immediately suggests that prose has its place in painting as in literature.  In literature we do not insist even that the poets be poetic.  Poetic is not the epithet that would be applied, for instance, to French classic verse or the English verse of the eighteenth century, compared with the poetry, French or English, which we mean when we speak of poetry.  Yet no one would think of denying the value of Dryden or even of Boileau.  No one would even insist that, distinctly prosaic as are the qualities of Boileau—­and I should say his was a crucial instance—­he would have done better to abjure verse.  And painting, in a wide sense, is just as legitimately the expression of ideas in form and color as literature is the expression of ideas in words.  It is perfectly plain that Meissonier was not especially enamoured of beauty, as Corot, as Troyon, as Decamps was.  But nothing could be less critical than to deny Meissouier’s importance and the legitimate interest he has for every educated and intelligent person, in spite of his literalness and his insensitiveness to the element of beauty, and indeed to any truly pictorial significance whatever in the wide range of subjects that he essayed, with, in an honorable sense, such distinguished success.

Especially in America, I think, where of recent years we have shown an Athenian sensitiveness to new impressions, the direct descendants of the classic period of French painting have suffered from the popularity of the Fontainebleau group.  Their legitimate attachment to art, instead of the Fontainebleau absorption in nature, has given them a false reputation of artificiality.  But the prose element in art has its justification as well as the poetic, and it is witness of a narrow culture to fail in appreciation of its admirable accomplishment.  The academic wing of the French romantic painting is marked precisely by a breadth of culture that is itself a source of agreeable and elevated interest.  The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated.  They lack the picturesque and unexpected note of their poetic brethren—­they lack the moving and interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of these; nay, they lack the penetrating distinction that radiates even from rusticity itself when it is inspired and transfigured as it appears in such works as those of Millet and Rousseau.  But their distinction is not less real for being the distinction of cultivation rather than altogether native and absolute.  It is perhaps even more marked, more pervasive, more directly associated with the painter’s aim and effect.  One feels that they are familiar with the philosophy of art, its history and practice, that