they are articulate and eclectic, that for being less personal and powerful their horizon is less limited, their purely intellectual range, at all events, and in many cases their aesthetic interest, wider.  They have more the cultivated man’s bent for experimentation, for variety.  They care more scrupulously for perfection, for form.  With a far inferior sense of reality and far less felicity in dealing with it, their sapient skill in dealing with the abstractions of art is more salient.  To be blind to their successful handling of line and mass and movement, is to neglect a source of refined pleasure.  To lament their lack of poetry is to miss their admirable rhetoric; to regret their imperfect feeling for decorativeness is to miss their delightful decorum.

V

As one has, however, so often occasion to note in France—­where in every field of intellectual effort the influence of schools and groups and movements is so great that almost every individuality, no matter how strenuous, falls naturally and intimately into association with some one of them—­there is every now and then an exception that escapes these categories and stands quite by itself.  In modern painting such exceptions, and widely different from each other as the poles, are Couture and Puvis de Chavannes.  Better than in either the true romanticists with the classic strain, or the academic romanticists with the classic temperament, the blending of the classic and romantic inspirations is illustrated in Couture.  The two are in him, indeed, actually fused.  In Puvis de Chavannes they appear in a wholly novel combination; his classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism, and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does not exist—­in the converse of Gautier’s phrase.  His distinction is wholly personal.  He lives evidently on an exceedingly high plane—­dwells habitually in the delectable uplands of the intellect.  The fact that his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental.  His talent, his genius if one chooses, requires large spaces, vast dimensions.  There has been a great deal of rather profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the primitifs or reproduces them sympathetically.  But really he does neither; he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a completely modern, as well as a thoroughly personal, way.  His color is as original as his general treatment and composition.  He had no schooling, in the Ecole des Beaux Arts sense.  A brief period in Henri Scheffer’s studio, three months under Couture, after he had begun life in an altogether different field of effort, yielded him all the explicit instruction he ever had.  His real study was done in Italy, in the presence of the old masters of Florence.  With this equipment he revolutionized modern decoration, established, at any rate, a new convention for it.