dear ones.  And it is to the honour of such writers as Roger Marx, Anatole France, Hamel, Morice, Mauclair, Verhaeren, Geffroy, that they recognised the genius of Carriere from the beginning.  In 1904 Carriere was made honorary president of the Autumn Salon and was the chief guest of these young painters, who really adored Paul Cezanne, and not the painter of an illusive psychology.  I wrote at that time:  “Carriere, whose delicately clouded portraits, so intimate in their revelation of the souls of his sitters, was not seen at his best.  He offered a large decorative panel for the Mairie of the Thirteenth Arrondissement, entitled Les Fiances, a sad-looking betrothal party ... the landscape timid, the decorative scheme not very effective...  His tender notations of maternity, and his heads, painted with the smoky enchantments of his pearly gray and soft russet, are more credible than this panneau.”  Was Carriere a decorative painter by nature—­setting aside training?  We doubt it, though Morice does not hesitate to name him after Puvis de Chavannes in this field.  The trouble is that he did not make many excursions into the larger forms.  He painted a huge canvas, Les Theatres Populaires, in which the interest is more intimate than epical.  He also did some decorations for the Hotel de Ville, The Four Ages for a Mairie, and the Christ at the Luxembourg and a view of Paris.  Nevertheless, it is his portraits that will live.

Carriere was, first and last, a symbolist.  There he is related to the Dutch Seer, Rembrandt; both men strove to seek for the eternal correspondence of things material and spiritual; both sought to bring into harmony the dissonance of flesh and the spirit.  Both succeeded, each in his own way—­though we need not couple their efforts on the technical side.  Rembrandt was a prophet.  There is more of the reflective poet in Carriere.  He is a mystic.  His mothers, his children, are dreams made real—­the magic of which Dolent speaks is always there.  To disengage the personality of his sitter was his first idea.  Slowly he built up those volumes of colour, light, and shadow, the solidity of which caused Rodin to exclaim:  “Carriere is also a sculptor!” Slowly and from the most unwilling sitter he extorted the secret of a soul.  We speak of John Sargent as the master psychologist among portraitists, a superiority he himself has never assumed; but that magnificent virtuoso, an aristocratic Frans Hals, never gives us the indefinite sense of things mystic beneath the epidermis of poor, struggling humanity as does Eugene Carriere.  Sargent is too magisterial a painter to dwell upon the infinite little soul-stigmata of men and women.  Who can tell the renunciations made by the Frenchman in his endeavour to wrest the enigma of personality from its abysmal depths?