the propaganda in every studio.

Since the bad example of Greuze, literature had wound round every
branch of painting until painting seemed to disappear in the parasite
like an oak under a cloud of ivy. The excess had been great--a
reaction was inevitable--and Rembrandt, with his Biblical legends,
furnished the necessary transition. But when a taste for painting had
been reacquired, one after the other the Dutch painters became the
fashion. It is almost unnecessary to point out the influence of
Hobbema on the art of Rousseau. Corot was less affected by the
Dutchmen, or, to speak more exactly, he assimilated more completely
what he had learnt from them than his rival was able to do. Moreover,
what he took from Holland came to him through Ruysdael rather than
through Hobbema.

The great morose dreamer, contemplative and grave as Wordsworth, must
have made more direct and intimate appeal to Corot's soul than the
charm and the gaiety of Hobbema's water-mills. Be this as it may, it
was Holland that revived the long-forgotten science of values in the
Barbizon painters. They sought their art in the direction of values,
and very easily Corot took the lead as chief exponent of the new
principle; and he succeeded in applying the principle of values to
landscape painting as fully as Rembrandt had to figure painting.

But at the moment when the new means of expression seemed most
distinctly established and understood, it was put aside and lost sight
of by a new generation of painters, and, curiously enough, by the men
who had most vigorously proclaimed the beauty and perfection of the
art which was to be henceforth, at least in practice, their mission to
repudiate. For I take it that the art of the impressionists has