It may be replied, and I confess I think with excellent reason, that Gerome’s picture has no window in it, and therefore that to ask of him to paint a picture as he would if he were painting a different picture, is pedantry.  The old masters are still admirable, though they only observed a correspondence to the actual scale of natural values, and were not concerned with imitation of it.  But it is to be observed that, successful as their practice is, it is successful in virtue of the unconscious co-operation of the beholder’s imagination.  And nowadays not only is the exercise of the imagination become for better or worse a little old-fashioned, but the one thing that is insisted on as a starting-point and basis, at the very least, is the sense of reality.  And it is impossible to exaggerate the way in which the sense of reality has been intensified by Manet’s insistence upon getting as near as possible to the individual values of objects as they are seen in nature—­in spite of his abandonment of the practice of painting on a parallel scale.  Things now drop into their true place, look as they really do, and count as they count in nature, because the painter is no longer content with giving us change for nature, but tries his best to give us nature itself.  Perspective acquires its actual significance, solids have substance and bulk as well as surfaces, distance is perceived as it is in nature, by the actual interposition of atmosphere, chiaro-oscuro is abolished—­the ways in which reality is secured being in fact legion the moment real instead of relative values are studied.  Something is lost, very likely—­an artist cannot be so intensely preoccupied with reality as, since Manet, it has been incumbent on painters to be, without missing a whole range of qualities that are so precious as rightly perhaps to be considered indispensable.  Until reality becomes in its turn an effect unconsciously attained, the painter’s imagination will be held more or less in abeyance.  And perhaps we are justified in thinking that nothing can quite atone for its absence.  Meantime, however, it must be acknowledged that Manet first gave us this sense of reality in a measure comparable with that which successively Balzac, Flaubert, Zola gave to the readers of their books—­a sense of actuality and vividness beside which the traditionary practice seemed absolutely fanciful and mechanical.

Applying Manet’s method, his invention, his discovery, to the painting of out-of-doors, the plein air school immediately began to produce landscapes of astonishing reality by confining their effort to those values which it is in the power of pigments to imitate.  The possible scale of mere correspondence being of course from one to one hundred, they secured greater truth by painting between twenty and eighty, we may say.  Hence the grayness of the most successful French landscapes of the present day—­those of Bastien-Lepage’s backgrounds, of Cazin’s pictures.  Sunlight being unpaintable, they confined