Another plate, L’ami des Danseuses, is charged with humanity.  The violinist who plays for the ballet rehearsals sits resting, and facing him are two young dancers, also sitting, but stooping to relieve their strained spines and the tendons of their muscular legs.  The old fellow is giving advice from the fulness of a life that has been not too easy.  The girls are all attention.  It is a genre bit of distinction.  Upon the technical virtuosity in which this etcher excels we shall not dwell.  Some of his single figures are marvels.  The economy of line, the massing of lights and darks, the vitality he infuses into a woman who walks, a man who works in the fields, a child at its mother’s breast, are not easily dealt with in a brief study.  We prefer to note his more general qualities.  His humour, whether in delineating a stupid soldier about to be exploited by camp followers, or in his Animales, is unforced.  It can be Rabelaisian and it can be a record of simple animal life, as in the example with the above title.  A cow stands on a grassy shore; near by a stolid peasant girl sits slicing bread and eating it.  Cow and girl, grass and sky and water are woven into one natural pattern.  The humour inheres in several sly touches.  It is a comical Millet.  Very Millet-like too is the large picture, Beau Soir, in which a field labourer bends over to kiss his wife, who has a child at her breast.  A cow nuzzles her apron, the fourth member of this happy group.  The Son of the Carpenter is another peasant study, but the transposition of the Holy Family to our century.  A slight nimbus about the mother’s head is the only indication that this is not a humble household somewhere in France.  Maternal Joy, Mater Inviolata are specimens of a sane, lovely art which celebrate the joys, dolors, and exaltations of motherhood.  We prefer this side of the art of Legrand to his studies of sinister jail-birds, hetairai, noctambules, high kickers, and private bars, the horrors of Parisian night life.  Whatever he touches he vivifies.  His leaping, audacious line is like the narrative prose of a Maupassant or a Joseph Conrad.  Every stroke tells.

His symbolical pictures please us least.  They doubtless signify no end of profound things, yet to us they seem both exotic and puerile.  We go back to the tiny dancers, tired to sleepiness, who sit on a sofa waiting to be called.  Poor babies!  Or to the plate entitled Douleur.  Or to the portraits of sweet English misses—­as did Constantin Guys, Legrand has caught the precise English note—­or any of the children pieces.  If he knows the psychology of passion, knows the most intimate detail of the daily life of les filles, Legrand is master too of the psychology of child life.  This will endear him to English and American lovers of art, though it is only one of his many endowments.  His wit keeps him from extremes, though some of his plates are not for puritans; his vivid sympathies prevent him from falling into the sterile eccentricities of so many of his contemporaries; if he is cynical he is by the same taken soft-hearted.  His superb handling of his material, with a synthetic vision superadded, sets apart Louis Legrand in a profession which to-day is filled with farceurs and fakers and with too few artists by the grace of God.