“The Death of Socrates,”[3] painted in 1787, now in private possession in Paris, enhanced David’s rapidly growing celebrity not only in France, but abroad. No less a personage than Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was then in Paris, said that he had studied the picture daily for a week, and with every inspection found it more perfect. It was, he said, “the greatest achievement since Raffael’s frescoes in the Vatican, and would have done honor to the Athenians of the Periclean age.” Today, of course, this estimate seems an exaggeration to us. The composition is assuredly well planned, and admirable in many of its aspects: the youth, who with averted face hands the poisoned cup to Socrates, and the other youth in the background beating his hands against the arch of the doorway. Some of the gestures seem theatrical, however, and individual figures, such as the athletic and uninspired Socrates, look as though they had been derived from a relief. The composition is too studied; it lacks feeling. Why is it that David’s great historical compositions are apt to leave us cold, especially those produced during a period of great spiritual and political turmoil in which his own sympathies were greatly involved? His part in the revolution amply proves the strength of the passions which might have found an outlet in his art. Why was he not the realist to dramatize those struggles like Delacroix who lived fifty years later, when revolution and world-war were over, yet who painted battles of all kinds with the most terrific naturalism. The answer lies in this very fact: Delacroix never witnessed the battle scenes he reproduced; they are the fruit of his imagination. It is impossible for a significant realistic art to develop during war and revolution. What one experiences at such times is so horrible that the imagination is stifled rather than stimulated. Only insensitive and coarse natures are capable of painting scenes of horror through which they have lived. When, and as now in our days, reality weighs all too heavily upon us, art, in self defense, becomes abstract and withdraws itself from reality. It is for this reason that the art of the revolution, David’s art, was stylized and cool: the artist perforce took refuge from the horrors of reality in the kingdom of his imagination. His art, like the poetry and oratory of the day, was idealistic in trend. When Robespierre delivered those terrible speeches that sent so many human beings to the guillotine, he spoke slowly, rhythmically, in artfully rounded phrases, as though he were holding an academic discussion. That the great revolutionaries, among whom we must number David, thought idealistically rather than realistically, is proved conclusively by their manner of expressing themselves. Like all fanatics they lived in a world of dreams and believed their ideas--which seemed to them so splendid--to be either already realized or on the verge of realization. They believed only one