MODERN ART
WHAT I have been praying for for many years has now been granted and to my surprise I find I do not like it particularly after all. We have begun shipping artists to Europe. The London Outlook has nabbed our Boardman Robinson and he is soon to begin firing broadsides of caricature into the already diminished ranks of the British aristocracy for a large salary. I swell with pride even as I write it, but collapse again into rebellion as I put the period to the sentence. For the supply of Boardman Robinsons in the country is limited. Upon sober second thought it really seems as though it would have been better to have waited with our exportations until we had had a few more Boardman Robinsons on hand.
For we had just lately begun to like him ourselves. We had just lately begun to know him. The elder Pierpont Morgan once said, when pressed by a Washington committee, that credit was founded upon character, and perhaps it is not too much to say that fame is founded upon it, too. Back of the drawings that were published in The Liberator, it began to be generally believed, was a character, a person of incorruptible probity and generous ideals. The caricatures, as caricatures, lacked the biting definition that made, a generation earlier, the work of Nast a force in politics, and scarcely scratched the surface of the equanimity of the present brand of voters. But what the drawings lacked in directness was more than balanced by spiritual qualities. People of delicate susceptibilities were found responding to them irrespective of their own party affiliations. The Liberator, itself, gained in tone through him for that reason. Indeed, it was the realization that Robinson insisted upon working for that review that first planted the idea of the artist's deep-rooted sincerity in the public mind. Heaven knows, doubtless, how the Liberator exists, but the public doesn't, and there have been put forward so many curious ways of raising money for The Liberator, such as Liberator balls, Liberator bookshops, et cetera, that the suspicion has grown that immense sums of money have not been available for its contributors, and that Boardman Robinson, among others, was sacrificing himself for his
