Courbet follows on Millet. Those mad on systematising have classed the two together as pioneers of Naturalism. What blindness to the essential! If anything does connect them—according to the Hegelian method—it is their very antithesis. Millet—let us think of the “Man with the Mattock,” “The Gleaners,” even “The Pig-Killing,” and the two pictures in the Century Exhibition: the field-labourer, who, his day’s work ended, is putting on his coat, and the mother feeding her little child with pap, as well as “The Angelus”—Millet indicates, in heavy painting and little-pleasing colours, in people whose coarse externals do not attract a spirituality that ennobles them and makes us forget their soil-stained smock-frocks and their hard features. Courbet, on the other hand, draws faultlessly, and is master of every knack of the trade; but, with his rich means, he never gets above the spiritual stage of photography, and he knows not how to open to us the smallest corner of the moral and spiritual being of his men and women. But, strangely enough, this same Courbet, who never conceives human beings except as soulless forms, can put a soul into nature and her lower-conditioned life. His justly famed “Sea-Waves” breathes a dramatic will-power. His “Roes in the Wood” are spirited. Ancient, mysterious wisdom appears to possess even his trees. Animals and plants, sea and land, speak in Courbet; man alone is dumb. He is a pantheist who excludes only man from the All-Divine. That is pessimism rooted in the most profound unconsciousness, which hints at serious organic disturbance. Rosa Bonheur, represented by a wonderful “Team of Oxen before a Hay Waggon,” is in this respect akin to Courbet. She, too, is an eloquent advocate of the beauty and profound feeling of the brute; but, more logical than Courbet, she confines herself to representing animals, and does not meddle with human beings. Man fails to interest her; she takes no heed of his indifferent appearance. The animal alone attracts her attention. A Rudyard Kipling of the brush, she has painted all her life the “Jungle-Book,” that tells of the wise and good and honest beasts, and the cunning men. Sir Edwin Landseer was also an animal-painter, but of quite another sort than Rosa Bonheur. When Landseer wanted to flatter the beasts, he gave them human qualities. Rosa Bonheur would have felt she was insulting her dear animals, if she had painted a picture like the “Diogenes” in the National Gallery in London. The humanising of animals seems to her like degrading their special animal beauty. Her love of animals was morbid; it was, however, a deep and powerful emotion that made of her a great artist.