are essential to the realist.  Art does not stand still.  Its canons change.  There is a constant evolution in its standards, its requirements.  A conventional background is no more an error in French classic painting than in tapestry; a perfunctory scheme of pure chiaro-oscuro is no blemish in one of Diaz’s splendid forest landscapes; such phenomena in a work of Raffaelli or Pointelin would jar, because, measured by the standards to which modern men must, through the very force of evolution itself, subscribe, they can but appear solecisms.  In a different set of circumstances, under a different inspiration, and with a different artistic attitude, solecisms they certainly are not.  But, as Thackeray makes Ethel Newcome say, “We belong to our belongings.”  Our circumstances, inspiration, artistic attitude, are involuntary and possess us as our other belongings do.

In Gautier’s saying, for instance, “I am a man for whom the visible world exists,” which I have quoted as expressing the key-note of the romantic epoch, it is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a spectacle simply—­significant, suggestive or merely stimulant, in accordance with individual bent.  Gautier and the romanticists generally had little concern for its structure.  To many of them it was indeed rather a canvas than a spectacle even—­just as to many, if not to most, of the realists it is its structure rather than its significance that altogether appeals; the romanticists in general sketched their ideas and impressions upon it, as the naturalists have in the main studied its aspects and constitution, careless of the import of these, pictorially or otherwise.  Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import?  Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of “documents” turned to any account?  Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort?  Courbet’s “Cantonniers,” Manet’s “Bar,” or Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc,” perhaps.  But what is indisputable is, that we are irretrievably committed to the present general aesthetic attitude and inspiration, and must share not only the romanticists’ impatience with academic formulae and conventions, but the realists’ devotion to life and the world as they actually exist.  The future may be different, but we are living in the present, and what is important is, after all, to live.  It is also so difficult that not to take the line of least resistance is fatuity.

II

It is at least an approximation to ascribe the primacy of realism to Courbet, though ascriptions of the kind are at best approximations.  Not only was he the first, or among the first, to feel the interest and importance of the actual world as it is and for what it is rather than for what it suggests, but his feeling in this direction is intenser than that of anyone else.  Manet was preoccupied with the values of