cinquante.”) But he has always been someone.  Compare with him L’Hermitte, a painter who illustrates sometimes the possibility of being an artificial realist.  His “Vintage” at the Metropolitan Museum, his “Harvesters” at the Luxembourg, are excellently real and true in detail, but in idea and general expression they might compete for the prix de Rome.  The same is measurably true of Lerolle, whose pictures are more sympathetic—­sometimes they are very sympathetic—­but on the whole display less power.  But in each instance the advocate a outrance of realism may justly, I think, maintain that a painter with a natural predisposition toward the insipidity of the academic has been saved from it by the inherent sanity and robustness of the realistic method.  Jean Beraud, even, owes something to the way in which his verisimilitude of method has reinforced his artistic powers.  His delightful Parisiennes—­modistes’ messengers crossing wet glistening pavements against a background of gray mist accented with poster-bedizened kiosks and regularly recurring horse-chestnut trees; elegantes at prayer, in somewhat distracted mood, on prie-dieus in the vacant and vapid Paris churches; seated at cafe tables on the busy, leisurely boulevards, or posing tout bonnement for the reproduction of the most fascinating feminine ensemble in the world—­owe their charm (I may say again their “fetchingness”) to the faithfulness with which their portraitist has studied, and the fidelity with which he has reproduced, their differing types, more than to any personal expression of his own view of them.  Fancy Beraud’s masterpiece, the Salle Graffard—­that admirable characterization of crankdom embodied in a socialist reunion—­painted by an academic painter.  How absolutely it would lose its pith, its force, its significance, even its true distinction.  And his “Magdalen at the Pharisee’s House,” which is almost equally impressive—­far more impressive of course in a literary and, I think, legitimate, sense—­owes even its literary effectiveness to its significant realism.

What the illustrators of the present day owe to the naturalistic method, it is almost superfluous to point out.  “Illustrators” in France are, in general, painters as well, some of them very eminent painters.  Daumier, who passed in general for a contributor to illustrated journals, even such journals as Le Petit Journal pour Rire, was not only a genius of the first rank, but a painter of the first class.  Monvel and Montenard at present are masterly painters.  But in their illustration as well as in their painting, they show a notable change from the illustration of the days of Daumier and Dore.  The difference between the elegant (or perhaps rather the handsome) drawings of Bida, an artist of the utmost distinction, and that of the illustrators of the present day who are comparable with him—­their name is not legion—­is a special attestation of the influence of the realistic ideal in a sphere