objects and spaces.  Bastien-Lepage, while painting these with the most scrupulous fidelity, was nevertheless always attentive to the significance and import of what he painted.  Courbet was a pure pantheist.  He was possessed by the material, the physical, the actual.  He never varies it a hair’s-breadth.  He never lifts it a fraction of a degree.  But by his very absorption in it he dignifies it immensely.  He illustrates magnificently its possibilities.  He brings out into the plainest possible view its inherent, integral, aesthetic quality, independent of any extraneity.  No painter ever succeeded so well with so little art, one is tempted to say.  Beside his, the love of nature which we ascribe to the ordinary realist is a superficial emotion.  He had the sentiment of reality in the highest degree; he had it intensely.  If he did not represent nature with the searching subtlety of later painters, he is certainly the forerunner of naturalism.  He has absolutely no ideality.  He is blind to all intimations of immortality, all unearthly voices.

Yet it would be wholly an error to suppose him a mere literalist.  No one is farther removed from the painstaking, grubbing imitators of detail so justly denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Whistler.  He has the generalizing faculty in very distinguished degree, and in very large measure.  Every trait of his talent, indeed, is large, manly; but for a certain qualification—­which must be made—­one might add, Olympian.  This qualification perhaps may be not unfairly described as earthiness—­never an agreeable trait, and one to which probably is due the depreciation of Courbet that is so popular even among appreciative critics.  It is easy to characterize Courbet as brutal and material, but what is easy is generally not exact.  What one glibly stigmatizes as brutality and grossness may, after all, be something of a particularly strong savor, enjoyed by the painter himself with a gusto too sterling and instinctive to be justifiably neglected, much less contemned.  The first thing to do in estimating an artist’s accomplishment, which is to place one’s self at his point of view, is, in Courbet’s case, unusually difficult.  We are all dreamers, more or less—­in more or less desultory fashion—­and can all appreciate that prismatic turn of what is real and actual into a position wherein it catches glints of the imagination.  The imagination is a universal touchstone.  The sense of reality is a special, an individual faculty.  When one is poetizing in an amateur, a dilettante way, as most of us poetize, a picture of Courbet, which seems to flaunt and challenge the imagination in virtue of its defiant reality, its insistence on the value and significance of the prosaic and the actual, appears coarse and crude.  It is not, however.  It is very far from that.  It is rather elemental than elementary—­in itself a prodigious distinction.  No modern painter has felt more intensely and reproduced more vigorously the sap that runs through and vivifies the various forms of natural phenomena.  To censure his shortcomings, to regret his imaginative incompleteness, is to miss him altogether.