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PORTRAITS.
the history of art is the successful rendering of child life. The adult usually draws children indiscriminately, seeing them as a mass of little creatures much alike, or else noticing them for the light they throw on our lives. Philosophers would say that our attitude towards them was subjective. We call them sweet, or cunning, or something else that describes the way they make us feel, not the way they themselves feel and think. Yet a child is an independent being, and the effect it has on us is an unimportant element in its own life. The artists, whether poets, novelists, painters, or sculptors, who have given the life of a child from the inside could almost be counted on one hand. These prevailing external views grow naturally out of the two facts that we cannot remember what the world was to us, and that the audience for which we speak is grown. In the fable the lion explains the victories of men over beasts in literature by the statement that the men write all the books. Per-
