gher perception, the greater degree of understanding. Cezanne's
fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its
gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it reaches the same
height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these two
geniuses, opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for the
artists of now, and to come. They are the gateway for our modern
esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of
all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most
of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct
expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but
quality and proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas were both
simple in the extreme, and of immense worth to us in their respective
spheres. We may think of them as the giants of the beginning of the
twentieth century, with the same burning desire to enlarge the general
scope of vision, and the finer capacity for individual experience.

ALBERT P. RYDER

Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of
mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the
mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that
element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of
poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics pure, for it has very
special spiritual histories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat
akin to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest Michel's wide
wastes of prodigal sky and duneland with their winding roads that have
no end, his ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy
stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some
vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more
aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper
hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion
of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth
of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded
those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as
these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet
that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain,
they never quite surrender to that ghostliness which possesses the
pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of
there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, so