Convinced that there was nothing in nature either indifferent or without its purpose, and that everything had a justification for its existence and played a part in the movement of universal life, he believed also that in everything, however small it might be, there was a special pictorial significance; and he toiled to discover this, to make it evident, and often forgot the while that art must make sacrifices if it is to move and charm. In his boundless veneration for the logical organism of nature he held, as a kind of categorical imperative, that it was right to give the same importance to the infinitely small as to the infinitely great. The notion was chimerical, and it wrecked him. In his last period the only things that will preserve their artistic reputation are his marvellously powerful drawings. No one ever had such a feeling for values, and thus he knew how to give his drawings--quite apart from their pithy weight of stroke--an effect of light which was forcibly striking. Just as admirable were the water-colours produced under the influence of Japanese picture-books. The pictures of petty detail which belong to these years have only an historical interest, and that merely because it is instructive to see how a great genius can deceive himself. One of his last works, the view of Mont Blanc, with the boundless horizon and the countless carefully and scrupulously delineated planes of ground, has neither pictorial beauty nor majesty. In the presence of this bizarre work one feels astonishment at the artist's endurance and strength of will, but disappointment at the result. He wanted to win the secret of its being from every undulation of the ground, from every blade of grass, and from every leaf; he was anxiously bent upon what he called _planimétrie_, upon the importance of horizontal planes, and he accentuated detail and accessory work beyond measure. His pantheistic faith in nature brought Théodore Rousseau to his fall. Those who did not know him spoke of his childish stippling and of the decline of his talent. Those who did know him saw in this stippling the issue of the same endeavours which poor Charles de la Berge had made before him, and of the principles on which the landscape of the English Pre-Raphaelites was being based about this time. If one looks at his works and then reads his life one almost comes to have for him a kind of religious veneration. There is something of the martyr in this insatiable observer, whose life was one long struggle, and to whom the study of the earth's construction and the anatomy of branches was almost a religion. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ COROT. A DANCE.] [Illustration: J. B. C. COROT. LANDSCAPE.]