From his youth upwards Théodore Rousseau was a masculine spirit; even as a stripling he was a man above all juvenile follies--one might almost say, a philosopher without ideals. In literature Turgenief's conception of nature might be most readily compared with that of Rousseau. In Turgenief's _Diary of a Sportsman_, written in 1852, everything is so fresh and full of sap that one could imagine it was not so much the work of a human pen as a direct revelation from the forest and the steppes. Though men are elsewhere habituated to see their joys and sorrows reflected in nature, the sentiment of his own personality falls from Turgenief when he contemplates the eternal spectacle of the elements. He plunges into nature and loses the consciousness of his own being in hers; and he becomes a part of what he contemplates. For him the majesty of nature lies in her treating everything, from the worm to the human being, with impassiveness. Man receives neither love nor hatred at her hands; she neither rejoices in the good that he does nor complains of sin and crime, but looks beyond him with her deep, earnest eyes because he is an object of complete indifference to her. "The last of thy brothers might vanish off the face of the earth and not a needle of the pine branches would tremble." Nature has something icy, apathetic, terrible; and the fear which she can inspire through this indifference of hers ceases only when we begin to understand the relationship in which we are to our surroundings, when we begin to comprehend that man and animal, tree and flower, bird and fish, owe their existence to this one Mother. So Turgenief came to the same point as Spinoza. [Illustration: COROT. EVENING.] And Rousseau did the same. The nature of Théodore Rousseau was devoid of all excitable enthusiasm. Thus the world he painted became something austere, earnest, and inaccessible beneath his hands. He lived in it alone, fleeing from his fellows, and for this reason human figures are seldom to be found in his pictures. He loved to paint nature on cold, grey impassive days, when the trees cast great shadows and forms stand out forcibly against the sky. He is not the painter of morning and evening twilight. There is no awakening and no dawn, no charm in these landscapes and no youth. Children would not laugh here, nor lovers venture to caress. In these trees the birds would build no nests, nor their fledglings twitter. His oaks stand as if they had so stood from eternity. "Die unbegrieflich hohen Werke Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag." Like Turgenief, Rousseau ended in Pantheism. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ COROT. AN EVENING IN NORMANDY.]