It is easy to say he had all the coarseness without the sentiment of the French peasantry, whence he sprang; that his political radicalism attests a lack of the serenity of spirit indispensable to the sincere artist; that he had no conception of the beautiful, the exquisite—­the fact remains that he triumphs over all his deficiencies, and in very splendid fashion.  He is, in truth, of all the realists for whom he discovered the way, and set the pace, as it were, one of the two naturalistic painters who have shown in any high degree the supreme artistic faculty—­that of generalization.  However impressive Manet’s picture may be; however brilliant Monet’s endeavor to reproduce sunlight may seem; however refined and elegant Degas’s delicate selection of pictorial material—­for broad and masterful generalization, for enduing what he painted with an interest deeper than its surface and underlying its aspect, Courbet has but one rival among realistic painters.  I mean, of course, Bastien-Lepage.

There is an important difference between the two.  In Courbet the sentiment of reality dominates the realism of the technic; in Bastien-Lepage the technic is realistically carried infinitely farther, but the sentiment quite transcends realism.  Imagine Courbet essaying a “Jeanne d’Arc!” Bastien-Lepage painting Courbet’s “Cantonniers” would not have stopped, as Courbet has done, with expressing their vitality, their actual interest, but at the same time that he represented them in far greater technical completeness he would also have occupied himself with their psychology.  He is indeed quite as distinctly a psychologist as he is a painter.  His favorite problem, aside from that of technical perfection, which perhaps equally haunted him, is the rendering of that resigned, bewildered, semi-hypnotic, vaguely and yet intensely longing spiritual expression to be noted by those who have the eyes to see it in the faces and attitudes now of the peasant laborer, now of the city pariah.  All his peasant women are potentially Jeannes d’Arc—­“Les Foins,” “Tired,” “Petite Fauvette,” for example.  The “note” is still more evident in the “London Bootblack” and the “London Flower-girl,” in which the outcast “East End” spiritlessness of the British capital is caught and fixed with a Zola-like veracity and vigor.  Such a phase as this is not so much pictorial or poetic, as psychological.  Bastien-Lepage’s happiness in rendering it is a proof of the exceeding quickness and sureness of his observation; but his preoccupation with it is equally strong proof of his interest in the things of the mind as well as in those of the senses.  This is his great distinction, I think.  He beats the realist on his own ground (except perhaps Monet and his followers—­I remember no attempt of his to paint sunlight), but he is imaginative as well.  He is not, on the other hand, to be in anywise associated with the romanticists.  Degas’s acid characterization of him, as “the Bouguereau of the modern movement,” is only just, if we remember what very radical and fundamental changes the “modern movement” implies in general attitude as well as in special expression.  I should be inclined, rather, to apply the analogy to M. Dagnan-Bouveret, though here, too, with many reserves looking mainly to the difference between true and vapid sentiment.