forget art should
be historical. We forget that we are now in our century. Ugliness, not
beauty, is the note of our century; turbulence, strife, materialism, the
mob, machinery, masses, not units. Why paint a captain of industry
against a Francois I tapestry? Paint him at his desk. The desk is a
throne; interpret it. We are ruled by mobs. Who paints mobs? What is
wrong is this, that art is in the bondage of literature--sentimentality.
We must record what we experience. Ugliness has its utility, its
magnetism; the ugliness of abject misery moves you to think, to readjust
ideas. We must be rebels, we young men. Ah, if we could only burn the
galleries, we should be forced to return to life."

"Bravo, Rantoul!"

"Right, old chap."

"Smash the statues!"

"Burn the galleries!"

"Down with tradition!"

"Eggs and more bock!"

But where Rantoul differed from the revolutionary regiment was that he
was not simply a painter who delivered orations; he could paint. His
tirades were not a furore of denunciation so much as they were the
impulsive chafing of the creative energy within him. In the school he
was already a marked man to set the prophets prophesying. He had a style
of his own, biting, incisive, overloaded and excessive, but with
something to say. He was after something. He was original.

"Rebel! Let us rebel!" he would cry to Herkimer from his agitated
bedquilt in the last hour of discussion. "The artist must always
rebel--accept nothing, question everything, denounce conventions and
traditions."

"Above all, work," said Herkimer in his laconic way.

"What? Don't I work?"

"Work more."

Rantoul, however, was not vulnerable on that score. He was not, it is
true, the drag-horse that Herkimer was, who lived like a recluse,
shunning the cafes and the dance-halls, eating up the last gray hours of
the day over his statues and his clays. But Rantoul, while living life
to its fullest, haunting the wharves and the markets with avid eyes,
roaming the woods and trudging the banks of the Seine, mingling in the
crowds that flashed under the flare of arc-lights, with a thousand
mysteries of mass and movement, never relaxed a moment the savage attack
his leaping nature made upon the drudgeries and routine of technic.

With the coveted admittance into the Salon, recognition came speedily
to the two chums. They made a triumphal entry into a real studio in the
Montparnasse Quarter, clients came, and the room became a statio