offend by what he did. If we are to have ash
cans and engines and broken-down bus-horses thrust down our throats as
art, Heaven preserve us. We had better turn to commonplace photography
at once and be done with it. Broken window shutters, dirty pavements,
half frozen ash cart drivers, overdrawn, heavily exaggerated figures of
policemen, tenement harridans, beggars, panhandlers, sandwich men--of
such is _Art_ according to Eugene Witla."

Eugene winced when he read this. For the time being it seemed true
enough. His art was shabby. Yet there were others like Luke Severas who
went to the other extreme.

"A true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the ability
to endow color--not with its photographic value, though to the current
thought it may seem so--but with its higher spiritual significance; the
ability to indict life with its own grossness, to charge it
prophetically with its own meanness and cruelty in order that mayhap it
may heal itself; the ability to see wherein is beauty--even in shame and
pathos and degradation; of such is this man's work. He comes from the
soil apparently, fresh to a great task. There is no fear here, no bowing
to traditions, no recognition of any of the accepted methods. It is
probable that he may not know what the accepted methods are. So much the
better. We have a new method. The world is the richer for that. As we
have said before, Mr. Witla may have to wait for his recognition. It is
certain that these pictures will not be quickly purchased and hung in
parlors. The average art lover does not take to a new thing so readily.
But if he persevere, if his art does not fail him, his turn will come.
It cannot fail. He is a great artist. May he live to realize it
consciously and in his own soul."

Tears leaped to Eugene's eyes when he read this. The thought that he was
a medium for some noble and super-human purpose thickened the cords in
his throat until they felt like a lump. He wanted to be a great artist,
he wanted to be worthy of the appreciation that was thus extended to
him. He thought of all the writers and artists and musicians and
connoisseurs of pictures who would read this and remember him. It was
just possible that from now onwards some of his pictures would sell. He
would be so glad to devote himself to this sort of thing--to quit
magazine illustration entirely. How ridiculous the latter was, how
confined and unimportant. Henceforth, unless driven by sheer necess