spite of Ingres’s refinement and Flandrin’s elevation—­in Prudhon.  Prudhon is the link between the last days of the classic supremacy and the rise of romanticism.  Like Claude, like Chardin, he stands somewhat apart; but he has distinctly the romantic inspiration, constrained and regularized by classic principles of taste.  He is the French Correggio in far more precise parallelism than Lesueur is the French Raphael.  With a grace and lambent color all his own—­a beautiful mother-of-pearl and opalescent tone underlying his exquisite violets and graver hues; a color-scheme, on the one hand, and a sense of design in line and mass more suave and graceful than anything since the great Italians, on the other—­he recalls the lovely chiaro-oscuro of the exquisite Parmesan as it is recalled in no other modern painter.  Occupying, as incontestably he does, his own niche in the pantheon of painters, he nevertheless illustrates most distinctly and unmistakably the slipping away of French painting from classic formulas as well as from classic extravagance, and the tendency to new ideals of wider reach and greater tolerance—­of more freedom, spontaneity, interest in “life and the world”—­of a definitive break with the contracting and constricting forces of classicism.  During its next period, and indeed down to the present day, French painting will preserve the essence of its classic traditions, variously modified from decade to decade, but never losing the quality in virtue of which what is French is always measurably the most classic thing going; but of this next period certainly Prudhon is the precursor, who, with all his classic serenity, presages its passion for “storms, clouds, effusion, and relief.”

II

ROMANTIC PAINTING

I

When we come to Scott after Fielding, says Mr. Stevenson, “we become suddenly conscious of the background.”  The remark contains an admirable characterization of romanticism; as distinguished from classicism, romanticism is consciousness of the background.  With Gros, Gericault, Paul Huet, Michel, Delacroix, French painting ceased to be abstract and impersonal.  Instead of continuing the classic detachment, it became interested, curious, and catholic.  It broadened its range immensely, and created its effect by observing the relations of its objects to their environment, of its figures to the landscape, of its subjects to their suggestions even in other spheres of thought; Delacroix, Marilhat, Decamps, Fromentin, in painting the aspect of Orientalism, suggested, one may almost say, its sociology.  For the abstractions of classicism, its formula, its fastidious system of arriving at perfection by exclusions and sacrifices, it substituted an enthusiasm for the concrete and the actual; it revelled in natural phenomena.  Gautier was never more definitely the exponent of romanticism than in saying “I