studied too closely, nor too long.  The secret of the universe is now pursued through observation, as formerly it was through fasting and prayer.  Nothing is sacred nowadays because everything receives respect.  If absolute beauty is now smiled at as a chimera, it is because beauty is perceived everywhere.  Whatever is may not be right—­the maxim has too much of an ex cathedra sound—­but whatever is is interesting.  Our attitude is at once humbler and more curious.  The sense of the immensity, the immeasurableness of things, is more intimate and profound.  What one may do is more modestly conceived; what might be done, more justly appreciated.  There is less confidence and more aspiration.  The artist’s eye is “on the object” in more concentrated gaze than ever heretofore.  If his sentiment, his poetry, is no longer “inevitable,” as Wordsworth complained Goethe’s was not, it is more reverent, at any rate more circumspect.  If he is less exalted he is more receptive—­he is more alive to impressions for being less of a philosopher.  If he scouts authority, if even he accepts somewhat weakly the thraldom of dissent from traditional standards and canons, it is because he is convinced that the material with which he has to deal is superior to all canons and standards.  If he esteems truth more than beauty, it is because what he thinks truth is more beautiful in his eyes than the stereotyped beauty he is adjured to attain.  In any case, the distinction of the realistic painters—­like that of the realists in literature, where, also, it need not be said, France has been in the lead—­is measurably to have got rid of solecisms; to have made, indeed, obvious solecisms, and solecisms of conception as well as of execution, a little ridiculous.  It is, to be sure, equally ridiculous to subject romantic productions to realistic standards, to blind one’s self to the sentiment that saturates such romantic works as Scott’s and Dumas’s, or Gericault’s and Diaz’s, and is wholly apposite to its own time and point of view.  The great difficulty with a principle is that it is universal, and that when we deal with facts of any kind whatever, universality is an impossible ideal.  Scott and Gericault are, nowadays, in what we have come to deem essentials, distinctly old-fashioned.  It might be well to try and imitate them, if imitation had any salt in it, which it has not; or if it were possible to do what they did with their different inspiration, which it is not.  Mr. Stevenson is, I think, an example of the danger of essaying this latter in literature, just as a dozen eminent painters of less talent—­for no one has so much talent as Mr. Stevenson—­are examples in painting.  But there are a thousand things, not only in the technic of the romanticists but in their whole attitude toward their art and their material, that are nowadays impossible to sincere and spontaneous artists.  Details which have no importance whatever in the ensemble of the romantic artist