it is too frank and clear and open, and shows too little evidence of the morbid brooding and hysterical forcing of an arbitrary and esoteric note dear to the English pre-Raphaelites.  It attests a delight in color, not a fondness for certain colors, hues, tints—­a difference perfectly appreciable to either an unsophisticated or an educated sense.  It has a solidity and strength of range and vibration combined with a subtle sensitiveness, and, as a result of the fusion of the two, a certain splendor that recalls Saracenic decoration.  And with this mastery of color is united a combined firmness and expressiveness of design that makes Delacroix unique by emphasizing his truly classic subordination of informing enthusiasm to a severe and clearly perceived ideal—­an ideal in a sense exterior to his purely personal expression.  In a word, his chief characteristic—­and it is a supremely significant trait in the representative painter of romanticism—­is a poetic imagination tempered and trained by culture and refinement.  When his audacities and enthusiasms are thought of, the directions in his will for his tomb should be remembered too:  “Il n’y sera place ni embleme, ni buste, ni statue; mon tombeau sera copie tres exactement sur l’antique, ou Vignoles ou Palladio, avec des saillies tres prononcees, contrairement a tout ce qui se fait aujourd’hui en architecture.”  “Let there be neither emblem, bust, nor statue on my tomb, which shall be copied very scrupulously after the antique, either Vignola or Palladio, with prominent projections, contrary to everything done to-day in architecture.”  In a sense all Delacroix is in these words.

III

Delacroix’s color deepens into an almost musical intensity occasionally in Decamps, whose oriental landscapes and figures, far less important intellectually, far less magistrales in conception, have at times, one may say perhaps without being too fanciful, a truly symphonic quality that renders them unique.  “The Suicide” is like a chord on a violin.  But it is when we come to speak of the “Fontainebleau Group,” in especial, I think, that the aesthetic susceptibility characteristic of the latter half of the nineteenth century feels, to borrow M. Taine’s introduction to his lectures on “The Ideal in Art,” that the subject is one only to be treated in poetry.

Of the noblest of all so-called “schools,” Millet is perhaps the most popular member.  His popularity is in great part, certainly, due to his literary side, to the sentiment which pervades, which drenches, one may say, all his later work—­his work after he had, on overhearing himself characterized as a painter of naked women, betaken himself to his true subject, the French peasant.  A literary, and a very powerful literary side, Millet undoubtedly has; and instead of being a weakness in him it is a power.  His sentimental appeal is far from being surplusage, but, as is not I think popularly appreciated,