It is interesting to note, however, the almost exclusively intellectual character of this imaginative side of Bastien-Lepage.  He does not view his material with any apparent sympathy, such as one notes, or at all events divines, in Millet.  Both were French peasants; but whereas Millet’s interest in his fellows is instinctive and absorbing, Bastien-Lepage’s is curious and detached.  If his pictures ever succeed in moving us, it is impersonally, in virtue of the camera-like scrutiny he brings to bear on his subject, and the effectiveness with which he renders it, and of the reflections which we institute of ourselves, and which he fails to stimulate by even the faintest trace of a loving touch or the betrayal of any sympathetic losing of himself in his theme.  You feel just the least intimation of the doctrinaire, the systematic aloofness of the spectator.  In moral attitude as well as in technical expression he no more assimilates the various phases of his material, to reproduce them afterward in new and original combination, than he expresses the essence of landscape in general, as the Fontainebleau painters do even in their most photographic moments.  Both his figures and his landscapes are clearly portraits—­typical and not merely individual, to be sure, but somehow not exactly creations.  His skies are the least successful portions of his pictures, I think; one must generalize easily to make skies effective, and perhaps it is not fanciful to note the frequency of high horizons in his work.

The fact remains that Bastien-Lepage stands at the head of the modern movement in many ways.  His friend, M. Andre Theuriet, has shown, in a brochure published some years ago, that he was himself as interesting as his pictures.  He took his art very seriously, and spoke of it with a dignity rather uncommon in the atmosphere of the studios, where there is apt to be more enthusiasm than reflection.  I recall vividly the impatience with which he once spoke to me of painting “to show what you can do.”  His own standard was always the particular ideal he had formed, never within the reach of his ascertained powers.  And whatever he did, one may say, illustrates the sincerity and elevation of this remark, whether one’s mood incline one to care most for this psychological side—­undoubtedly the more nearly unique side—­of his work, or for such exquisite things as his “Forge” or the portrait of Mme Sarah Bernhardt.  Incontestably he has the true tradition, and stands in the line of the great painters.  And he owes his permanent place among them not less to his perception that painting has a moral and significant, as well as a representative and decorative sanction, than to his perfect harmony with his own time in his way of illustrating this—­to his happy fusion of aspect admirably rendered with profound and stimulating suggestion.

III