Their legitimate attachment to art, instead of
the Fontainebleau absorption in nature, has given them a false
reputation of artificiality. But the prose element in art has its
justification as well as the poetic, and it is witness of a narrow
culture to fail in appreciation of its admirable accomplishment. The
academic wing of the French romantic painting is marked precisely by a
breadth of culture that is itself a source of agreeable and elevated
interest. The neo-Grec painters are thoroughly educated. They lack the
picturesque and unexpected note of their poetic brethren--they lack the
moving and interpreting, the elevating and exquisite touch of these;
nay, they lack the penetrating distinction that radiates even from
rusticity itself when it is inspired and transfigured as it appears in
such works as those of Millet and Rousseau. But their distinction is not
less real for being the distinction of cultivation rather than
altogether native and absolute. It is perhaps even more marked, more
pervasive, more directly associated with the painter's aim and effect.
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