he began eloquently to plead the cause of his own people.

It is possible that the definitive biography of so great a master in art as Millet has yet to be written. Sensier's biography has the great advantage of being a "human document" written by a friend who had known the artist long and intimately; but it also has the disadvantage of presenting Millet's life from Sensier's point of view alone, and in consequence the book lacks historical perspective. Still, it is a book that no serious student of Millet can afford to neglect, and for purposes of study the American translation seems to be the more useful, because in it a good deal of irrelevant matter has been eliminated, while the essentials remain.

After Sensier's death, many people came forward with the declaration that the biographer, instead of having been Millet's good angel, had taken advantage of the artist's necessities, and had exploited him unmercifully. Undoubtedly Sensier bought Millet's works for years at a small fraction of the price which the same works would fetch to-day, and it is equally true that after the master's death he sold them at a great profit; but it was "that or nothing" with the artist in those early years, and this was not Sensier's fault. It may be of interest here to record on this question the opinion of two of Millet's own children with whom the present writer conversed on several occasions during the summer of 1900. Charles Millet declares that his father was much indebted

to his future biographer for sympathetic aid of various kinds; and his sister, Mme. Saignier, who was grown up long before Millet died, frankly says: "My father taught his children to love and reverence Alfred Sensier next after le bon Dieu."

PAINTER-ETCHER

Being a Condensation of the Lecture delivered before the Grolier Club and afterward repeated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University, etc.

HE time is happily past when an "etching

TH

was supposed to be a drawing done with pen and ink, and when a collector exhibiting some fine proof was liable to have the unmeaning question put to him: "Now is this the original?"

as if there were only one. People now know what an etching is and how it is made, they know that a painter-etching is one designed as well as executed by its author, and knowing all this they understand why, of all forms of art-expression, painter-etching is the most personal and the most intellectual. The time is also past when an etching was vaguely believed to be an alleged work of art, of mysterious and obscure significance, "to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness." We now know that there is no mystery about it, and that what to an educated eye looks right and true is right and true, while what looks wrong and false is wrong and false.

1 Sir Seymour Haden died June 1, 1910, in his ninety-second year.

To the superficial and unsympathetic observer an etching may appear a very simple and trifling thing, but in reality it is a most difficult thing to produce worthily. We have, alas, too many etchings such as they are but the world has never had enough really fine ones. Masteretchers of the first rank are and always have been very few indeed, and the master does not always rise to the height of a masterpiece. The masterpiece in art must be perfect, and perfect from every point of view: it must embody a noble scheme nobly expressed, and above all it must be entirely original and entirely personal to the artist who creates it.

These things being so, the genuine master in etching would simply be stupid if he were devoid of a proper sense of his own importance. Rembrandt must have known that he was a very great man; Van Dyck was the associate of kings and nobles; the unhappy Frenchman, Meryon, while slowly going mad from neglect and absolute hunger, yet indignantly spurned every aid that looked like charity; Whistler, through evil report and good report, always insisted upon the dignity of the artist. This he never forgot even while waging his "never-ending, still-beginning" fights and quarrels.

This noble respect of the artist for his art was once quaintly illustrated by the great singer Malibran. Having traveled to St. Petersburg with her troupe, the Empress Catherine the Great asked her to name her price for a series of operatic

performances there; and, astonished at what she considered the exorbitant demands of the artiste, the Empress exclaimed, "Why, that is more than I pay the major-generals of my army!" to which the artiste made answer, "Your Majesty should make your major-generals sing for you!"

Probably no artist — certainly no etcher — has vindicated his art with so much intellectual power, such convincing authority and such success as has Seymour Haden. I speak now not of his etchings, but of his published writings and of his leadership in the revival of painter-etching.

It is curious how the impetus toward some public movement seems to be generated almost simultaneously in the minds of several men, often residing far apart and holding no communication with each other. It was so with this interesting revival. Seymour Haden was by no means the only etcher or the only writer; but he stands alone in this: that he combined in himself the double rôle of etcher and writer of the first rank. To these we must add still another qualification: he is by nature a man of affairs, a leader of men - and a leader of artists, which I take to be a very rare qualification indeed!

He found painter-etching almost forgotten and unknown, a vague tradition of the seventeenth century, and it is in a great measure due to this strong and earnest man that in his own country the Association of Painter-Etchers has been raised, by decree of the Sovereign, to the dignity of a British Royal Society - the equal