of these subjects every scrap has been passed through
the blazing furnace of conception and fused into artistic form. It is as
though a potter, working with dirty hands, had left a stain burnt by the
fire into his gloriously fashioned clay. The blemish is superficial;
the form is untouched. With Rousseau it is otherwise: lumps of unfused
matter break through his conception and into his design; his pudding is
not thoroughly baked. Take that well-known picture of his, _Le Present
et le Passe_, which used to be in the Jastrebzoff collection, and of
which photographs are familiar to everyone: the two silly, detached
heads in the sky, stuck in for sentiment's sake, are, as the saying
goes, "out of the picture" and yet play the devil with it. They
injure the design. What is more, in themselves they are as feeble and
commonplace as the drawing of a pavement artist, which, in fact, they
resemble. They are unfelt, that is the explanation--unfelt aesthetically.
They have not been through the oven. They are artistically insincere.
Sentimentality makes strange bedfellows. Rousseau has slipped into
the very hole wherein Mr. Frank Dixie and Sir Luke Fildes disport
themselves; only, by betraying his vice in a picture that is, for the
most part, so exquisitely sure in its simple, delicate expression of
a frank and charming vision he gives us an impressive example of the
danger, even to a good artist, of bad taste.

And there is another fault in Rousseau that springs from this lack of
complete artistic integrity. He is something plebeian: he suffers a
slightly self-complacent good-fellowship to creep into his pictures.
Occasionally there grins through his design, and ever so little
disfigures it, a touch of fatuity. He cannot help being glad that he is
so simple and so good, nor quite resist telling us about it. Look at
that portrait of himself--and I impose a most agreeable task, for it
is charming--that portrait dated 1890, and belonging also to M.
Jastrebzoff; do you not feel that the author is a little too well
pleased with himself? Do you not fancy that he will soon be regaling his
sitter with a good, round platitude from the exterior boulevards or a
morsel from some regimental ditty in which he once excelled, that, in
another moment, he will be tapping him on the back, and that he has gone
a little out of his way to tell you these things? The Primitives tell
us nothing of that sort; they stick to their business of creating
signif