as created by a species of creeping
dialogue. (The Intruder is an example), but Edvard Munch working in an
art of two dimensions where impressions must be simultaneous, is more
dynamic. The shrill dissonance in his work is instantly reflected in
the brain of the speaker. In his best work--not his skeletons dancing
with plump girls, or the youthful macabre extravagances after the
manner of Rops, Rethel, De Groux, or James Ensor--he does invoke a
genuine thrill.

Psychologic, in the true sense of that much-abused word, are his
portraits; indeed, I am not sure that his portraits will play second
fiddle to his purely imaginative work in the future. There is the
Strindberg, certainly the most authoritative presentment of that
strange, unhappy soul. The portraits of Hans Jaeger, the poet (in oil),
the etched head of Doctor A., the etched head of Sigbjorn Obstfelder,
poet who died young, as well as the self-portraits and the splendidly
constructed figure and eloquent expression in the portrait of a woman,
an oil-painting now in the National Gallery, Christiania, these and
many others serve as testimony to a sympathetic divination of
character. His etched surfaces are never as silvery as those of Anders
Zorn, who is a virtuoso in the management of the needle. Not that
Munch disdains good craftsmanship, but he is obsessed by character;
this is the key-note of his art. How finely he expresses envy,
jealousy, hatred, covetousness, and the vampire that sometimes lurks
in the soul of woman. An etching, Hypocrisy, with its faint leer on
the lips of a woman, is a little masterpiece. His sick people are
pitiful, that is, when they are not grotesque; the entire tragedy of
blasted childhood is in his portrait of The Sick Child.

As a rule he seldom condescends to sound the note of sentimentality.
He is an illustrator born, and as such does not take sides, letting
his parable open to those who can read. And his parable is always
legible. He distorts, deforms, and with his strong, fluid line
modulates his material as he wills, but he never propounds puzzles in
form, as do the rest of the experimentalists. The human shape does not
become either a stovepipe or an orchid in his hands. His young
mothers are sometimes dithyrambic (as in Madonna) or else despairing
outcasts. One plate of his which always affects me is his Dead Mother,
with the little daughter at the bedside, the cry of agony arrested on
her lips, the death chamber exhaling pov