Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/12

From "La Mist'en Laire" in "Vieilles Chansons."

haps Robert Louis Stevenson thought of this fable when he wrote "A Child's Garden of Verses," in which the mind of the child has at least an equal expression with the mind of his older and sophisticated observer. The mingling of the two points of view promises to be the modern spirit.

Boutet de Monvel, although he is in part a man of age and experience, the head of a household, with a place in the world which he sustains with dignity and takes to heart seriously, amusing himself with the child's ingenuousness, is also one who understands and whose talent is particularly fit to depict the child as an independent creature with a life of its own. His children are genuinely childish, with no admixture of adult quality. The earlier artists gave often the physical attributes of babyhood, but they put in the baby body the soul of a man, or no soul at all. In the old religious pictures the child may show divinity, spirituality, in his face, but he does not show infantile thoughts. He was not treated psychologically. Delia Robbia boys might walk, their forms are so real. We also know their personalities; each one of them is an individual child, and Delia Robbia is an exception among the masters. But it is more than pitiful, it is irritating, to see in all the galleries of Italy those little forms with the heads of clever, knowing old people, with eyes full of wisdom and worldliness. So the hearty baby bodies in the pictures of Rubens have no sign of as many different natures as there are in the distinct men and women of the same paintings. Most great dramatic artists, realizing instinctively that men do not see children from the inside, have kept them out of their works. In all of Shakespeare's plays there is no child who counts for much; and in all great drama, perhaps, the one child who is famous is the Joas of Racine.

In a sense, at least, as the artist himself thinks, it was accident that led De Monvel to a field so far removed from the interests of strong artists; but when hazard led him there, little time was needed to show him how to fill it. If he was to draw children, he must draw them with the reality with which he had always seen their elders. He must give us not only the charm of their fragility and innocence, but, if not the revelation, at least a clear suggestion, of what they feel. Whether or not chance influenced his choice of subjects, the world is the gainer. Young persons are usually bored by the child; they meet him and pass him by; but old people notice him. The more experience a man gains and digests the simpler his interest becomes; complexities in the end appear trivial, and the elementary things are seen as the elemental and important ones. De Monvel reached such a spirit younger than most men do. He always had a marked element of sane and serious reality in him, and nature allowed him to begin where most of us are landed when love and sorrow, suffering

From "La Civilité Puérile et Honnête."