Not long since, we heard much of naÏvetÉ—it was the fashion among the schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie—it was fashionable to draw naÏvely, as it was called. We were expected to believe in a highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it was the resort of a certain number who wanted to realize speedy results among the unintelligent. It was a pose which lasted not long because it was obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had not the prescribed ease about it and showed signs of labor. It had, for a time, its effect upon really intelligent artists with often respectable results, as it drew the tendency away from too highly involved sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many ways, and helped men to a franker type of self-expression; and was, as we may expect, something apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the great modern individualists, those who were seeking direct contact with subject.

We have learned in a short space of time that whatever was exceptional in the ideas and attitudes of the greater ones, as we know them, was not at all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected naÏvetÉ such as we have heard so much about, but was, on another hand, a real phase of their originality, the other swing of the pendulum, so to call it. It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same sincerity of feeling, the same spirit directing their research. The single peculiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, is its special relationship to the time in which it is being produced, explicitly of this age.

What we know of the men, much or little, proves that they are, and have all been, simple earnest men, intelligent, following nowise blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period striving toward a more vigorous type of values—something as beautiful as the machinery of our time—it is not as yet to any great degree cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, even trusted. It has destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased to focus, or rather, does not wish to concentrate on things which do not visualize the literary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child, Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be naÏve and childlike, certainly it was this simple artist who remained so.

If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent: to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places, somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his home life, and the life which centered about the charming rue de Perelle where he lived.

In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense something strange springing up out of the soil in the dark of night, he was not mushroom. He did not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt if he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so much was he that element himself.

It is with fascination that we think of him as living his life out after his discharge for incompetency from the customs service outside the fortifications of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of poverty upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from the world famous quartiers, and almost certainly knowing nothing of them. That there was a Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not likely that he knew, or if he knew, not more than vaguely. He drew his quaint inspirations directly from the sources of nature and some pencil drawings I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, amounting to love and worship, which he had for nature and the phenomena of her, to be disclosed at every hedge.

If he was no success as a douanier, he was learning a great deal, meanwhiles, about those delicate and radiant skies which cover Paris at all times, charming always for their lightness and delicacy, pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true naÏvetÉ, without struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and of emotion, following diligently with mind and with spirit the forms of those stored images that have registered themselves with directness upon the area of his imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered with perfect simplicity for us in these quaint pictures of his, superb in the richness of quality which makes of them, what they are to the eye that is sympathetic to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all the machinations and intrigues of the outer world, a life intimate with itself, remote from all agencies having no direct association with it, living with a sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclosures, occupied apparently with nothing beyond the loveliness contained in them.

There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the mind in the work of this simple man. It was a wealth of innocence that tinged all his methods, and his pictures are as simple in their appeal as are the declarations of Jacob Boehme—they are the songs of innocence and experience of a nature for whom all the world was beautiful, and have about them the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the pictures of this true and charming naif, will find nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme simplicity, he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of image that characterizes every touch of school. He was taught only by nature and consulted only her relationships and tendencies. There is never a mistaking of that. Nature was his influence, and he saw with an untrammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, and affixed no falsity of feeling, or anything, to his forms which might have detracted from their extreme simplicity. He had "first sight," first contact with the image, and sought nothing else beyond this, and a very direct correspondence with memories dictated all his efforts.

That Rousseau was musical, is shown in the natural grace of his compositions, and his ideas were simple as the early songs of France are simple, speaking of everyday things with simple heart and voice, and he painted frankly what he saw in precisely the way he saw it. We, who love richness and sobriety of tone, will never tire of Rousseau's beautiful blacks and greys, and probably no one has excelled them for delicacy of appreciation, and perfection of gradation. It will be long before the landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before the exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Harlequin" will fade from remembrance, we shall remember them all for their loveliness in design, a gift which never failed him, no matter what the subject. Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that taught him this, and therein lay his special power, a genuine feeling for the richness of laces and brocades in full and subdued tones, such as one would find in the elaborate intricacies of tropical foliage, strange leaves intermingled with parrots, monkeys, strange white lilies on high stalks, tigers peering through highly ornate foliage and branches intertwined, all excellently suggestive of that foreign land in which the mind wanders and finds itself so much at home.

"Le Charmeur," "Jadwigha," in these are concentrated all that is lovely in the land of legend; and, like all places of legend, replete with imaginative beauty, the places where loveliness and beauty of form congregate, after they have passed through the sensuous spaces of the eye travelling somewhere to an abode where all those things are that are perfect, they live forever. Rousseau was a charming and lovable child, whether he was painting or whether he was conducting his own little orchestra, composed of those people who kept shop around his home, and it is as the child of his time that he must be considered, child in verity among the sophisticated moderns who believed and believe more in intellect than in anything else, many of whom paid tribute to him, and reverenced him, either in terms of sincere friendship, or by occasional visit. The various anecdotes, touching enough, are but further proof of the innocence of this so simple and untutored person.

The real amateur spirit has, we like to think, much in its favor, if only for its freshness, its spontaneity, and a very gratifying naturalness. Rousseau was all of this, and lived in a world untouched, he wove about himself, like other visionaries, a soft veil hiding all that was grossly unreal to him from all that was real, and for Rousseau, those things and places he expressed existed vividly for him, and out of them his pictures became true creations. He was the real naif, because he was the real child, unaffected and unspoiled, and painting was for him but the key of heaven that he might open another door for the world's weary eye.