neck. A very familiar figure is that of Seneca, with distorted features, uttering his last words of wisdom while the blood pours from his opened veins. After the madness of the Cæsars comes the atrocious history of the Merovingian kings. _Luminais_, the painter of Gauls and barbarians, represented in his large picture "Les Énervés de Jumièges" the sons of King Clovis II, who, after the muscles of their knees have been destroyed by fire, are set helplessly adrift in a boat on the Seine. Then followed torture scenes from the time of the Inquisition, and saints burning at the stake. The conception which this post-Romantic generation had of the East was of cruelty and voluptuousness mixed, a thing pieced together out of white bodies, purple streams of blood, and brown backgrounds. Here, the favourite Sultana contemplates the severed head of her rival, which stares at her out of its glassy eyes; there, eunuchs are making ready to strangle a woman condemned to death. In works such as these the genius, powerful in composition, of Benjamin Constant, celebrates its triumphs. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DELAUNAY. BOYS SINGING.] [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ DELAUNAY. MADAME TOULMOUCHE.] Yet, notwithstanding all the means of allurement furnished by such themes, these paintings almost invariably fail to produce the anticipated effect. Not that it is the brutality of the subjects that makes them unpleasant. Art in all times has busied itself with the horrible. How voluptuously does Dante depict the horrors of Hell! What imagination was ever peopled with figures more dreadful than those conceived by Shakespeare? Cruelty and death have a poetry of their own: why should Art prudishly abstain from depicting them? Only, if the result is to be a good picture, the subject must be in strict congruity with the talent employed upon it, and in the majority of these works this conformity is lacking. The subjects alone had become more savage and brutal. In the manner of treatment there is none of the wild effect which the Neapolitans of the seventeenth century gave to their scenes of martyrdom. Spirits truly wild, like Delacroix and Caravaggio, are not to be met with every day. The painters who launched out upon these bloodthirsty themes took absolutely no inward "enjoyment in tragical subjects," but simply painted them as if after precepts learned at school. And as they were also deficient in that knowledge of nature which is acquired only by direct study of life, not one of them was in a position to give to his historical scenes that naturalistic weight which alone gives to such themes a character of convincing probability. True, these pictures compel respect on account of their unusual ability. These naked bodies, twisting themselves in the most varying postures of pain, give proof by their correct draughtsmanship of the most painstaking anatomical studies, yet after all they are nothing more than inverted Laocoöns.