re, and
have all been, simple earnest men, intelligent, following nowise
blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or
freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially
of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this
period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period
striving toward a more vigorous type of values--something as beautiful
as the machinery of our time--it is not as yet to any great degree
cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, even trusted. It has
destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased to
focus, or rather, does not wish to concentrate on things which do not
visualize the literary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle
was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly
among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child,
Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be naive and
childlike, certainly it was this simple artist who remained so.

If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as
painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable
that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in
all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent:
to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal
life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially
always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes
or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them
covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places,
somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences
of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the
latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris
herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his
home life, and the life which centered about the charming rue de
Perelle where he lived.

In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of
the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the
examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the
sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of
directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image
chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of
himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sens