tives; and this the _douanier_ possessed in an
extraordinary degree.

Of Rousseau's sense of the decorative possibilities of paint it is,
I suppose, unnecessary to say anything. Gauguin called his black
"inimitable." But, indeed, we all agree now that, if the term
"decorative" is to be used in this limited and rather injurious sense,
Rousseau, as a decorator, takes rank with the very greatest. More
important is it to realize that Rousseau had his problem; and that he
approached it in the spirit of a Primitive. His reactions were as simple
and genuine as those of any child; he experienced them with that passion
which alone provokes to creation; his problem was to express them
sincerely and simply in the medium of which he could make such exquisite
use. His vision was as unsophisticated as that of Orcagna, and in
translating it he was as conscientious; but he was a smaller artist
because he was less of an artist.

It has been said that Rousseau came short of greatness for want of
science. That I do not believe. Can it be supposed that any man who has
applied himself intelligently to any art for forty years will not have
acquired science enough to state clearly what is clear, intense, and
clamoring for expression in his mind? I see no reason for supposing that
Rousseau ever failed from lack of science to express himself completely.
The fault was in what he had to express. Rousseau was inferior to the
great Primitives because he lacked their taste, or, to put the matter
more forcibly, because he was less of an artist. An artist's conception
should be like a perfectly cooked pudding--cooked all through and in
every part. His problem is to create an expressive form that shall fit
exactly an artistic conception. His subject may be what he pleases. But
unless that subject has been carried to the high regions of art, and
there, in a dry aesthetic atmosphere, sealed up in a purely aesthetic
conception it can never be externalized in pure form. That is what the
great Primitives did, and what the _douanier_ could not do always. In
his pudding there are doughy patches. He is sentimental; and he is not
sentimental as Raphael and El Greco are.

With a race of genteel, but strangely obtuse, critics it was formerly
the fashion to depreciate Raphael and El Greco on the ground that they
were sentimental. Sentimental they are, in a sense. Their subjects
are sentimental; and the religiosity of some of Greco's is downright
disgusting. But