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 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.
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