When he attained the maturity of his powers, that Naturalism was the trump-card in painting, of which Bastian Lepage’s abominable “Reaper,” whose brutalised grimace grins at the visitor to the Luxembourg Museum, was admired as the highest achievement. The young critic had eyes only for this art. The multitude dared not question the fulsome praise squandered on the works of the naturalists; but their inner voice was not mute. They had qualms of conscience about their culpable cowardice, and were quite well aware that naturalism, which was lauded to them as Progress and the Future, was in reality the negation of all art. Then Puvis de Chavannes stepped forward with his big wall-paintings, which put symbolism, sacred legend, and history on the stage, on a literary background, and reunited them to tradition, which had been disowned or scoffed at by naturalism, out of barbaric ignorance or vulgar arrogance. The multitude, whose inward feelings partisan criticism outraged, turned forthwith to the painter who seemed to them a deliverer and an avenger. He was a living protest against the art of the vulgar, the hideous, and the commonplace; against the art of the mechanically dull copying of a soulless reality. He took pains to serve beauty. He showed unmistakably the object of his spiritualising his figures and actions. Before his pictures one could once more dream. After prose, after vulgar, slangy prose, it was verse. People did not even ask if the verses were good; people were satisfied with mediocre verses, provided they were verses. To Puvis de Chavannes his fundamental, academic instincts had given the direction; but whilst he followed his bent, he became, without intending it, and without previously knowing it, the file-leader of the right-about turn, which began in “the ’eighties” and has now long ended. In a period of idealism he would have been one of the many. People would not have noticed him or would have found in him much to take exception to: the banality of his symbols, the impersonality, smoothness, and polish of his draughtsmanship, the intentional incoherence of his compositions. During the predominance of naturalism, his academic banality itself seemed a courageous act, and seekers after the ideal even accounted his most obvious faults and weaknesses as excellencies in him.