Had Regnault lived, he would have more adequately—­or should I say more plausibly?—­marked the transition from romanticism to realism.  Temperamentally he was clearly a thorough romanticist—­far more so, for instance, than his friend Fortuny, whose intellectual reserve is always conspicuous.  He essayed the most vehement kind of subjects, even in the classical field, where he treated them with truly romantic truculence.  He was himself always, moreover, and ideally cared as little for nature as a fairy-story teller.  In this sense he was more romantic than the romanticists.  His “Automedon,” his portrait of General Prim, even his “Salome,” are wilful in a degree that is either superb or superficial, as one looks at them; but at any rate they are romantic a outrance.  At the same time it was unmistakably the aspect of things rather than their significance, rather than his view of them, that appealed to him.  He was farther away from the classic inspiration than any other romanticist of his fellows; and at the same time he cared for the external world more on its own account and less for its suggestions, than any painter of equal force before Courbet and Bastien-Lepage.  The very fact that he was not, intellectually speaking, wholly dans son assiette, as the French say, shows that he was a genius of a transitional moment.  One’s final thought of him is that he died young, and one thinks so not so much because of the dramatic tragedy of his taking off by possibly the last Prussian bullet fired in the war of 1870-71, as because of the essentially experimental character of his painting.  Undoubtedly he would have done great things.  And undoubtedly they would have been different from those that he did; probably in the direction—­already indicated in his most dignified performance—­of giving more consistency, more vivid definiteness, more reality, even, to his already striking conceptions.

III

REALISTIC PAINTING

I

To an intelligence fully and acutely alive, its own time must, I think, be more interesting than any other.  The sentimental, the scholastic, the speculative temperament may look before or after with longing or regret; but that sanity of mind which is practical and productive must find its most agreeable sensations in the data to which it is intimately and inexorably related.  The light upon Greek literature and art for which we study Greek history, the light upon Roman history for which we study Latin literature and art, are admirable to us in very exact proportion as we study them for our ends.  To every man and every nation that really breathes, true vitality of soul depends upon saying to one’s self, with an emotion of equivalent intensity to the emotion of patriotism celebrated in Scott’s familiar lines, This is my own, my native era and environment.  Culture is impossible apart from cosmopolitanism, but self-respect is more