The peculiarity of all these masters, who on their first appearance were often despised as realists or naturalists, consists precisely in this: they never represented, at least in the works of their later period in which they thoroughly expressed themselves,--they never represented actual nature in the manner of photography, but freely painted their own moods from memory, just as Goethe when he stood in the little house in the Kikelhahn near Ilmenau, instead of elaborating a prosaic description of the Kikelhahn, wrote the verses _Ueber allen Wipfeln ist Ruh_. In this poem of Goethe one does not learn how the summits looked, and there is no allusion to the play of light, and yet the forest, dimly illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, is presented clearly to the inward eye. Any poet before Goethe's time would have made a broad and epical description, and produced a picture by the addition of details; but here the very music of the words creates a picture of rest and quietude. The works of the Fontainebleau artists are Goethe-like poems of nature in pigments. They are as far removed from the æsthetic aridness of the older landscape of composition, pieced together from studies, as from the flat, prosaic fidelity to nature of that "entirely null and void, spuriously realistic painting of the so-called guardians of woods and waters." They were neither concerned to master nature and compose a picture from her according to conventional rules, nor pedantically to draw the portrait of any given region. They did not think of topographical accuracy, or of preparing a map of their country. A landscape was not for them a piece of scenery, but a condition of soul. They represent the victory of lyricism over dry though inflated prose. Impressed by some vision of nature, they warm to their work and produce pictures that could not have been anticipated. And thus they fathomed art to its profoundest depths. Their works were fragrant poems sprung from moods of spirit which had risen in them during a walk in the forest. Perhaps only Titian, Rubens, and Watteau had previously looked upon nature with the same eyes. And as in the case of these artists, so also in that of the Fontainebleau painters, it was necessary that a genuine realistic art, a long period of the most intimate study of nature, should have to be gone through before they reached this height. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ ROUSSEAU. THE LAKE AMONG THE ROCKS AT BARBIZON.] [Illustration: _L'Art._ ROUSSEAU. A POND, FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU.]