And an
even more striking illustration of the evolution of realistic thought
and feeling, as well as of rendering, is furnished by the succession of
Forain to Grevin, as an illustrator of the follies of the day, the
characteristic traits of the Parisian seamy side, morally speaking.
Grevin is as conventional as Murger, in philosophy, and--though
infinitely cleverer--as "Mars" in drawing. Forain, with the pencil of a
realism truly Japanese, illustrates with sympathetic incisiveness the
pitiless pessimism of Flaubert, Goncourt, and Maupassant as well.
VI
But to go back a little and consider the puissant individualities, the
great men who have really given its direction to and, as it were, set
the pace of, the realistic movement, and for whom, in order more
conveniently to consider impressionism pure and simple by itself, I have
ventured to disturb the chronological sequence of evolution in French
painting--a sequence that, even if one care more for ideas than for
chronology, it is more temerarious to vary from in things French than in
any others.
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