With a race of genteel, but strangely obtuse, critics it was formerly the fashion to depreciate Raphael and El Greco on the ground that they were sentimental.  Sentimental they are, in a sense.  Their subjects are sentimental; and the religiosity of some of Greco’s is downright disgusting.  But of these subjects every scrap has been passed through the blazing furnace of conception and fused into artistic form.  It is as though a potter, working with dirty hands, had left a stain burnt by the fire into his gloriously fashioned clay.  The blemish is superficial; the form is untouched.  With Rousseau it is otherwise:  lumps of unfused matter break through his conception and into his design; his pudding is not thoroughly baked.  Take that well-known picture of his, Le Present et le Passe, which used to be in the Jastrebzoff collection, and of which photographs are familiar to everyone:  the two silly, detached heads in the sky, stuck in for sentiment’s sake, are, as the saying goes, “out of the picture” and yet play the devil with it.  They injure the design.  What is more, in themselves they are as feeble and commonplace as the drawing of a pavement artist, which, in fact, they resemble.  They are unfelt, that is the explanation—­unfelt aesthetically.  They have not been through the oven.  They are artistically insincere.  Sentimentality makes strange bedfellows.  Rousseau has slipped into the very hole wherein Mr. Frank Dixie and Sir Luke Fildes disport themselves; only, by betraying his vice in a picture that is, for the most part, so exquisitely sure in its simple, delicate expression of a frank and charming vision he gives us an impressive example of the danger, even to a good artist, of bad taste.

And there is another fault in Rousseau that springs from this lack of complete artistic integrity.  He is something plebeian:  he suffers a slightly self-complacent good-fellowship to creep into his pictures.  Occasionally there grins through his design, and ever so little disfigures it, a touch of fatuity.  He cannot help being glad that he is so simple and so good, nor quite resist telling us about it.  Look at that portrait of himself—­and I impose a most agreeable task, for it is charming—­that portrait dated 1890, and belonging also to M. Jastrebzoff; do you not feel that the author is a little too well pleased with himself?  Do you not fancy that he will soon be regaling his sitter with a good, round platitude from the exterior boulevards or a morsel from some regimental ditty in which he once excelled, that, in another moment, he will be tapping him on the back, and that he has gone a little out of his way to tell you these things?  The Primitives tell us nothing of that sort; they stick to their business of creating significant form.  Whatever of their personalities may reach us has passed through the transmuting fires of art:  they never prattle.  The Primitives are always distinguished; whereas occasionally the douanier is as much the reverse as the more successful painters to the British aristocracy are always.