They have a quicker sense for the beautiful, I think.  They feel very certainly much more deeply the suggestiveness of a scene.  They are not so debonnaires in the presence of their problems.  In a sense, for that reason, they understand them better.  There is very little feeling of the desert, the illimitable space, where, according to Balzac, God is and man is not, in the “Hagar and Ishmael;” indeed there seems to have been no attempt on the part of the painter to express any.  True as his sand-heap is, you feel somehow that there may be a kitchen-garden or the entrance to a coal-mine on the other side of it, or a little farther along.  And the landscape of the “Judith,” fine as its sweep is, and admirable as are the cool tone and clear distance of the picture, might really be that of the “south meadow” of some particular “farm” or other.

The contrast which Guillaumet presents to Fromentin affords a very striking illustration of the growth of the realistic spirit in recent years.  Fromentin is so admirable a painter that I can hardly fancy any appreciative person wishing him different.  His devoted admirer and biographer, M. Louis Gonse, admits, and indeed expressly records, Fromentin’s own lament over the insufficiency of his studies.  Fond as he was of horses, for instance, he does not know them as a draughtsman with the science of such a conventional painter in many other respects as Schreyer.  But it is not in the slightly amateurish nature of his technical equipment—­realized perfectly by himself, of course, as the first critic of the technic of painting among all who have ventured upon the subject—­that his painting differs from Guillaumet’s.  It is his whole point of view.  His Africa is that of the critic, the litterateur, the raffine.  Guillaumet’s is Africa itself.  You feel before Guillaumet’s Luxembourg canvases, as in looking over the slightest of his vivid memoranda, that you are getting in an acute and concentrated form the sensations which the actual scenes and types rendered by the painter would stimulate in you, supposing, of course, that you were sufficiently sensitive.  Fromentin, in comparison, is occupied in picture-making—­giving you a beautifully colored and highly intelligent pictorial report as against Guillaumet’s actual reproduction.  There is no question as to which of the two painters has the greater personal interest; but it is just as certain that for abiding value and enduring charm personal interest must either be extremely great or else yield to the interest inherent in the material dealt with, an interest that Guillaumet brings out with a felicity and a puissance that are wholly extraordinary, and that nowadays meet with a readier and more sympathetic recognition that even such delicate personal charm as that of Fromentin.

IV