no scene of the merely spectral, no optical
trickery. The waves of light are magnetic. The picture floats in
space, seemingly compelled by its frame into limits. Gustave Geffroy
once wrote that, in common with the great masters, Carriere, on his
canvas, gives a sense of volume and weight. Whatever he sacrificed, it
was not actuality. His draughtsmanship never falters, his touch is
never infirm.

I have seen his portraits of Verlaine, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt,
Geffroy, of the artist himself and many others. The Verlaine is a
veritable evocation. It was painted at one _seance_ of several hours,
and the poet, it is said, did not sit still or keep silence for a
moment. He was hardly conscious that he was being painted. What a
head! Not that of the old faun and absinthe-sipping vagabond of the
Latin quarter, but the soul that lurked somewhere in Verlaine; the
dreamer, not the mystifier, the man crucified to the cross of
aspiration by his unhappy temperament. Musician and child, here is the
head of one of those pious, irresponsible mendicants who walked dusty
roads in the Middle Ages. It needed an unusual painter to interpret an
unusual poet.

The Daudet face is not alone full of surface character, but explains
the racial affinities of the romancer. Here he is David, not Daudet.
The head of De Goncourt gives in a few touches--Carriere is ever
master of the essential--the irritable pontiff of literary
impressionism. Carriere was fond of repeating: "For the artist the
forms evoke ideas, sensations, and sentiments; for the poet,
sensations, ideas, sentiments evoke forms." Never expansively lyrical
as was Monticelli, Carriere declared that a picture is the logical
development of light. And on the external side his art is a continual
variation with light as a theme. Morice contends that he was a
colourist; that the blond of Rubens and the russet of Carriere are not
monochromes; that polychromy is not the true way of seeing nature
coloured. Certainly Carriere does not sacrifice style, expression,
composition for splashing hues. Yet his illuminating strokes appear to
proceed from within, not from without. He interrogates nature, but her
answer is a sober, not a brilliant one. Let us rather say that his
colouring is adequate--he always asserted that a sense of proportion
was success in art. His tone is peculiarly personal; he paints
expressions, the fleeting shades that cross the face of a man, a
woman, a child. He patiently awa