And when that essentially modern creature, the English or
American girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns
as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself
defenceless; he submitted or he fled. His French respectability,
quite as precise as ours, though covering different provinces of
life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But the girls were
painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last
saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair
invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the
holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he
hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.
This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist.
The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its
crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part,
when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the
necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman,
is excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment,
to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least,
the king's highway of progress.
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