I never hesitate about scraping out the work of days, and
beginning afresh, so as to satisfy myself, and try to do better.
Ah! that "better" which one feels in one's soul, and without
which no true artist is ever content!
Others may approve and admire; but that counts for nothing,
compared with one's own feeling of what ought to be.
--_Meissonier's Conversations_
[Illustration: MEISSONIER]
Life in this world is a collecting, and all the men and women in it are
collectors.
The question is, What will you collect? Most men are intent on collecting
dollars. Their waking-hours are taken up with inventing plans, methods,
schemes, whereby they may secure dollars from other men. To gather as
many dollars as possible, and to give out as few, is the desideratum. But
when you collect one thing you always incidentally collect others. The
fisherman who casts his net for shad usually secures a few other fish,
and once in a while a turtle, which enlarges the mesh to suit, and gives
sweet liberty to the shad. To focus exclusively on dollars is to secure
jealousy, fear, vanity, and a vaulting ambition that may claw its way
through the mesh and let your dollars slip into the yeasty deep.
Ragged Haggard and his colleague, Cave-of-the-Winds, collect bacteria;
while the fashionable young men of the day, with a few exceptions, are
collecting headaches, regrets, weak nerves, tremens, paresis--death. Of
course we shall all die (I will admit that), and further, we may be a
long time dead (I will admit that), and moreover, we may be going through
the world for the last time--as to that I do not know; but while we are
here it seems the part of reason to devote our energies to collecting
that which brings as much quiet joy to ourselves, and as little annoyance
to others, as possible.
My heart goes out to the collector. In the soul of the collector of old
books, swords, pistols, brocades, prints, clocks and bookplates, there is
only truth. If he gives you his friendship, it is because you love the
things that he loves; he has no selfish wish to use your good name to
further his own petty plans--he only asks that you shall behold, and
beholding, your eye shall glow, and your heart warm within you.
Inasmuch as we live in the age of the specialist, one man often collects
books on only one subject, Dante for instance; another, nothing but
volumes printed at Venice; another, works concerning the stage; and still
another devotes all his spare time to securing tobacco-pipes. And I am
well aware that the man who for a quarter of a century industriously
collects snuffboxes has a supreme contempt for the man who collects both
snuffboxes and clocks. And in this does the specialist reveal that his
normal propensity to collect has degenerated. That is to say, it has
refined itself into an abnormality, and from the innocent desire to
collect, has shifted off into a selfish wish to outrival.
The man who collects many things, with easy, natural leanings toward,
say, spoons, is pure in heart and free from guile; but when his soul
centers on spoons exclusively, he has fallen from his high estate and is
simply possessed of a lust for ownership--he wants to own more peculiar
spoons than any other man on earth. Such a one stirs up wrath and
rivalry, and is the butt and byword of all others who collect spoons.
Prosperous, practical, busy people sometimes wonder why other folks build
cabinets with glass fronts and strong locks and therein store
postage-stamps, bits of old silks, autographs and books that are very
precious only when their leaves are uncut; and so I will here endeavor to
explain. At the same time I despair of making my words intelligible to
any but those who are collectors, or mayhap to those others who are in
the varioloid stage.
Then possibly you say I had better not waste good paper and ink by
recording the information, since collectors know already, and those who
are without the pale have neither eyes to see nor hearts to incline. But
the simple fact is, the proposition that you comprehend on first hearing
was yours already; for how can you recognize a thing as soon as it comes
into view if you have never before seen it? You have thought my thought
yourself, or else your heart would not beat fast and your lips say, "Yes,
yes!" when I voice it. Truth is in the air, and when your head gets up
into the right stratum of atmosphere you breathe it in. You may not know
that you have breathed it in until I come along and write it out on this
blank sheet, and then you read it and say, "Yes--your hand! that is
surely so; I knew it all along!"
And so then if I tell you a thing you already know, I confer on you the
great blessing of introducing you to yourself and of giving you the
consciousness that you know.
And to know you know is power. And to feel the sense of power is to feel
a sense of oneness with the Source of Power.
Let's see--what was it, then, that we were talking about? Oh, yes!
collectors and collecting.
Men collect things because these things stir imagination and link them
with the people who once possessed and used these things. Thus, through
imagination, is the dead past made again to live and throb and pulse with
life. Man is not the lonely creature that those folks with bad digestions
sometimes try to have us believe.
We are brothers not only to all who live, but to all who have gone
before.
And so we collect the trifles that once were valuables for other men, and
by the possession of these trifles are we bounden to them. These things
stimulate imagination, stir the sympathies, and help us forget the
cramping bounds of time and space that so often hedge us close around.
The people near us may be sordid, stupid, mean; or more likely they are
weary and worn with the battle for mere food, shelter and raiment; or
they are depressed by that undefined brooding fear which civilization
exacts as payment for benefits forgot--so their better selves are
subdued.
But through fancy's flight we can pick our companions out of the company
of saints and sinners who have long turned to dust. I have the bookplates
of Holbein and Hogarth, and I have a book once owned by Rembrandt, and so
I do not say Holbein and Hogarth and Rembrandt were--I say they are.
And thus the collector confuses the glorious dead and the living in one
fairy company; and although he may detect varying degrees of excellence,
for none does he hold contempt, of none is he jealous, none does he envy.
From them he asks nothing, upon him they make no demands. In the
collector's cast of mind there is something very childlike and ingenuous.
My little girl has a small box of bright bits of silk thread that she
hoards very closely; then she possesses certain pieces of calico, nails,
curtain-rings, buttons, spools and fragments of china--all of which are
very dear to her heart. And why should they not be? For with them she
creates a fairy world, wherein are only joy, and peace, and harmony, and
light--quite an improvement on this! Yes, dearie, quite.
* * * * *
Ernest Meissonier, the artist, began collecting very early. He has told
us that he remembers, when five years of age, of going with his mother to
market and collecting rabbits' ears and feet, which he would take home,
and carefully nail up on the wall of the garret. And it may not be amiss
to explain here that the rabbit's foot as an object of superstitious
veneration has no real place outside of the United States of America, and
this only south of Mason and Dixon's line.
The Meissonier lad's collection of rabbits' ears increased until he had
nearly colors enough to run the chromatic scale. Then he collected
pigeons' wings in like manner, and if you have ever haunted French
market-places you know how natural a thing this would be for a child. The
boy's mother took quite an interest in his amusements, and helped him to
spread the wings out and arrange the tails fan-shape on the walls. They
had long strings of buttons and boxes of spools in partnership; and when
they would go up the Seine on little excursions on Sunday afternoons,
they would bring back rich spoils in the way of swan feathers,
butterflies, "snake-feeders" and tiny shells. Then once they found a
bird's nest, and as the mother bird had deserted it, they carried it
home. That was a red-letter day, for the garret collection had increased
to such an extent that a partition was made across the corner of a room
by hanging up a strip of cloth. And all the things in that corner
belonged to Ernest--his mother said so. Ernest's mother seems to have had
a fine, joyous, childlike nature, so she fully entered into the life of
her boy. He wanted no other companion. In fact, this mother was little
better herself than a child in years--she was only sixteen when she bore
him. They lived at Lyons then, but three years later moved to Paris. Her
temperament was poetic, religious, and her spirit had in it a touch of
superstition--which is the case with all really excellent women.
But this sweet playtime was not for long--the mother died in Eighteen
Hundred Twenty-five, aged twenty-four years.
I suppose there is no greater calamity that can befall a child than to
lose his mother. Still, Nature is very kind, and for Ernest Meissonier
there always remained firm, clear-cut memories of a slight, fair-haired
woman, with large, open, gray eyes, who held him in her arms, sang to
him, and rocked him to sleep each night as the darkness gathered. He
lived over and over again those few sunshiny excursions up the river; and
he knew all the reeds and flowers and birds she liked best, and the
places where they had landed from the boat and lunched together were
forever to him sacred spots.
But the death of his mother put a stop for a time to his collecting. The
sturdy housekeeper who came to take the mother's place, speedily cleared
"the truck" out of the corner, and forbade the bringing of any more
feathers and rabbits' feet into her house--well, I guess so! The birds'
nests, long grasses, reeds, shells and pigeons' wings were tossed
straightway into the fireplace, and went soaring up the chimney in smoke.
The destruction of the collection didn't kill the propensity to collect,
however, any more than you can change a man's opinions by burning his
library. It only dampened the desire for a time. It broke out again after
a few years and continued for considerably more than half a century.
There was a house at Poissy "full to the roof-tiles" of books, marbles,
bronzes and innumerable curios, gathered from every corner of the earth;
and a palace at Paris filled in like manner, for which Ernest Meissonier
had expended more than a million francs.
In the palace at Paris, when the owner was near his threescore years and
ten, he took from a locker a morocco case, and opening it, showed his
friend, Dumas, a long curl of yellow hair; and then he brought out a
curious old white-silk dress, and said to the silent Dumas, "This curl
was cut from my mother's head after her death, and this dress was her
wedding-gown."
A few days after this Meissonier wrote these words in his journal: "It is
the Twentieth of February--the morning of my seventieth birthday. What a
long time to look back upon! This morning, at the hour when my mother
gave me birth, I wished my first thoughts to be of her. Dear Mother, how
often have the tears risen to my eyes at the remembrance of you! It was
your absence--the longing I had for you--that made you so dear to me. The
love of my heart goes out to you! Do you hear me, Mother, calling and
crying for you? How sweet it must be to have a mother, I say to myself."
* * * * *
"I would have every man rich," said Emerson, "that he might know the
worthlessness of riches."
Every man should have a college education, in order to show him how
little the thing is really worth. The intellectual kings of the earth
have seldom been college-bred. Napoleon ever regretted the lack of
instruction in his early years; and in the minds of such men as Abraham
Lincoln and Ernest Meissonier there usually lingers the suspicion that
they have dropped something out of their lives.
"I'm not a college man--ask Seward," said Lincoln, when some one
questioned him as to the population of Alaska. The remark was merry jest,
of course, but as in all jest there lurks a grain of truth, so did there
here.
At the height of Meissonier's success, when a canvas from his hand
commanded a larger price than the work of any other living artist, he
exclaimed, "Oh, if only I had been given the advantages of a college
training!"
If he had, it is quite probable that he never would have painted better
than his teacher. Discipline might have reduced his daring genius to
neutral salts, and taken all that fine audacity from his brush.
He was a natural artist: he saw things clearly and in detail; he had the
heart to feel, and he longed for the skill to express that which he saw
and felt. And when the desire is strong enough it brings the thing--and
thus is prayer answered.
Meissonier while but a child set to work making pictures--he declared he
would be an artist. And in spite of his father's attempts to shame him
out of his whim, and to starve him into a more practical career, his
resolution stuck.
He worked in a drugstore and drew on the wrapping-paper; then with this
artist a few days, and then with that. He tried illustrating, and finally
a bold stand was made and a little community formed that decided on
storming the Salon.
There is something pathetic in that brotherhood of six young men, binding
themselves together, swearing they would stand together and aid each
other in producing great art.
The dead seriousness of the scheme has a peculiar sophomore quality.
There were Steinheil, Trimolet, Daumier, Daubigny, Deschaumaes and
Meissonier, all aged about twenty, strong, sturdy, sincere and innocently
ignorant--all bound they would be artists.
Two of these young men were sign-painters, the others did odd jobs
illustrating, and filled in the time at anything which chance offered.
When one got an invitation out to dinner he would go, and furtively drop
biscuit and slices of meat into his lap, and then slyly transfer them to
his waistcoat-pockets, so as to take them to his less fortunate brethren.
They haunted the galleries, made themselves familiar with catalogs,
criticized without stint, knew all about current prices, and were able
to point out the great artists of Paris when they passed proudly up the
street.
They sketched eternally, formed small wax models, and made great
preparations for masterpieces.
The reason they did not produce the masterpieces was because they did not
have money to buy brushes, paints and canvas. Neither did they have funds
to purchase food to last until the thing was done; and it is difficult to
produce great art on half-rations. So they formed the brotherhood, and
one midnight swore eternal fealty. They were to draw lots: the lucky
member was to paint and the other five were to support him for a month.
He was to be supplied his painting outfit and to be absolutely free from
all responsibility as to the bread-and-butter question for a whole month.
Trimolet was the first lucky man.
He set diligently to work, and dined each evening on a smoking
mutton-chop with a bottle of wine, at a respectable restaurant. The five
stood outside and watched him through the window--they dined when and
where they could.
His picture grew apace, and in three weeks was completed. It was
entitled, "Sisters of Charity Giving Out Soup to the Poor." The work was
of a good machine-made quality, not good enough to praise nor bad enough
to condemn: it was like Tomlinson of Berkeley Square.
On account of the peculiar subject with which it dealt, it found favor
with a worthy priest, who bought it and presented it to a convent.
This so inflated Trimolet that he suggested it would be a good plan to
keep right on with the arrangement, but the five objected.
Steinheil was next appointed to feed the vestal fire. His picture was
so-so, but would not sell.
Daubigny came next, and lived so high that inspiration got clogged, fatty
degeneration of the cerebrum set in, and after a week he ceased to
paint--doing nothing but dream.
When the turn of the fourth man came, Meissonier had concluded that the
race must be won by one and one, and his belief in individualism was
further strengthened by an order for a group of family portraits, with a
goodly retainer in advance.
Straightway he married Steinheil's sister, with whom he had been some
weeks in love, and the others feeling aggrieved that an extra mouth to
feed, with danger of more, had been added to the "Commune," declared the
compact void.
Trimolet still thought well of the arrangement, though, and agreed, if
Meissonier would support him, to secure fame and fortune for them both.
Meissonier declined the offer with thanks, and struck boldly out on his
own account.
The woman who had so recklessly agreed to share his poverty must surely
have had faith in him--or are very young people who marry incapable of
either faith or reason? Never mind; she did not hold the impulsive young
man back.
She couldn't--nothing but death could have stayed such ambition. His will
was unbending and his ambition never tired.
He was an athlete in strength, and was fully conscious that to be a good
animal is the first requisite. He swam, rowed, walked, and could tire out
any of his colleagues at swordplay or skittles.
But material things were scarce those first few years of married life,
and once when the table had bread, but no meat nor butter, he took the
entire proceeds of a picture and purchased a suit of clothing of the time
of Louis the Grand: not to wear, of course--simply to put in the
"collection."
Small wonder is it that, for some months after, when he would walk out
alone the fond wife would caution him thus: "Now Ernest, do not go
through that old-clothes market--you know your weakness."
"I have no money, so you need not worry," he would gaily reply.
Of those times of pinching want he has written, "As to happiness--is it
possible to be wretched at twenty, when one has health, a passion for
art, free passes for the Louvre, an eye to see, a heart to feel, and
sunshine gratis?"
But poverty did not last long. Pictures such as this young man produced
must attract attention anywhere.
He belonged to no school, but simply worked away after his own fashion;
what he was bound to do was to produce a faithful picture--sure, clear,
strong, vivid. He saw things clearly and his sympathies were acute, as is
shown in every canvas he produced.
Meissonier had the true artistic conscience--he was incapable of putting
out an average, unobjectionable picture--it must have positive
excellence. "There is a difference," said he, "between a successful
effort and a work of love." He painted only in the loving mood.
No greater blessing than the artistic conscience can come to any worker
in art, be he sculptor, writer, singer or painter. Hold fast to it, and
it shall be your compass in time when the sun is darkened. To please the
public is little, but to satisfy your Other Self, that self that leans
over your shoulder and watches your every thought and deed, is much. No
artistic success worth having is possible unless you satisfy that Other
Self.
But like the moral conscience it can be dallied with until the grieved
spirit turns away, and the wretch is left to his fate.
Meissonier never hesitated to erase a whole picture when it did not
satisfy his inward sense--customers might praise and connoisseurs offer
to buy, it made no difference. "I have some one who is more difficult to
please than you," he would say; "I must satisfy myself."
The fine intoxication that follows good artistic work is the highest joy
that mortals ever know. But once let a creative artist lower his
standard and give the world the mere product of his brain, with heart
left out, that man will hate himself for a year and a day. He has sold
his soul for a price: joy has flown, and bitterness is his portion.
Meissonier never trifled with his compass. To the last he headed for the
polestar.
* * * * *
The early domestic affairs of Meissonier can best be guessed from his
oft-repeated assertion that the artist should never marry. "To produce
great work, Art must be your mistress," he said. "You must be married to
your work. A wife demands unswerving loyalty as her right, and a portion
of her husband's time she considers her own. This is proper with every
profession but that of Art. The artist must not be restrained, nor should
even a wife come between him and his Art. The artist must not be judged
by the same standards that are made for other men. Why? Simply because
when you begin to tether him you cramp his imagination and paralyze his
hand. The priest and artist must not marry, for it is too much to expect
any woman to follow them in their flight, and they have no moral right to
tie themselves to a woman and then ask her to stay behind."
From this and many similar passages in the "Conversations" it is clear
that Meissonier had no conception of the fact that a woman may possibly
keep step with her mate. He simply never considered such a thing.
A man's opinions concerning womankind are based upon the knowledge of the
women he knows best.
We can not apply Hamerton's remark concerning Turner to Meissonier.
Hamerton said that throughout Turner's long life he was lamentably
unfortunate in that he never came under the influence of a strong and
good woman.
Meissonier associated with good women, but he never knew one with a
spread of spiritual wing sufficient to fit her to be his companion. There
is a minor key of loneliness and heart hunger running through his whole
career. Possibly, in the wisdom of Providence, this was just what he
needed to urge him on to higher and nobler ends. He never knew peace, and
the rest for which he sighed slipped him at the very last. "I'm tired, so
tired," he sighed again and again in those later years, when he had
reached the highest pinnacle.
And still he worked--it was his only rest! Meissonier painted very few
pictures of women, and in some miraculous way skipped that stage in
esthetic evolution wherein most artists affect the nude. In his whole
career he never produced a single "Diana," nor a "Susanna at the Bath."
He had no artistic sympathy with "Leda and the Swan," and once when
Delaroche chided him for painting no pictures of women, he was so
ungallant as to say, "My dear fellow, men are much more beautiful than
women!"
During the last decade of his life Meissonier painted but one portrait of
a woman, and to America belongs the honor. The sitter was Mrs. J. W.
Mackay, of California.
As all the world knows, Mrs. Mackay refused to accept the canvas. She
declared the picture was no likeness, and further, she would not have it
for a gift.
"So you do not care for the picture?" asked the great artist.
"Me? Well, I guess not--not that picture!"
"Very well, Madam. I think--I think I'll keep it for myself. I'll place
it on exhibition!" And the great artist looked out of the window in an
absent-minded way, and hummed a tune.
This put another phase on the matter. Mrs. Mackay winced, and paid the
price, which rumor says was somewhere between ten and twenty-five
thousand dollars. She took the little canvas in her carriage and drove
away with it, and what became of the only portrait of a woman painted by
Meissonier during his later years, nobody knew but Mrs. Mackay, and Mrs.
Mackay never told.
Meissonier once explained to a friend that his offense consisted in
producing a faithful likeness of the customer.
The Mackay incident did not end when the lady paid the coin and accepted
the goods. Meissonier, by the haughtiness of his manner, his artistic
independence, and most of all, by his unpardonable success, had been
sowing dragons' teeth for half a century. And now armed enemies sprang
up, and sided with the woman from California. They made it an
international episode: less excuses have involved nations in war in days
agone. But the enemies of Meissonier did not belong alone to America,
although here every arm was braced and every tongue wagged to vindicate
the cause of our countrywoman.
In Paris the whole art world was divided into those who sided with
Meissonier and those who were against him. Cafes echoed with the sounds
of wordy warfare; the columns of all magazines and newspapers bulged with
heated argument; newsboys cried extras on the street, and bands of
students paraded the boulevards singing songs in praise of Mrs. Mackay
and in dishonor of Meissonier, "the pretender." The assertion was made
again and again that Meissonier had fed sham art upon the public, and by
means of preposterous prices and noisy puffing had hypnotized a world.
They called him the artist of the Infinitely Little, King of Lilliput,
and challenged any one to show where he had thrown heart and high emotion
into his work. Studies of coachmen, smokers, readers, soldiers,
housemaids, chess-players, cavaliers and serenaders were not enough upon
which to base an art reputation--the man must show that he had moved men
to high endeavor, said the detractors. A fund was started to purchase the
Mackay portrait, so as to do the very thing that Meissonier had
threatened to do, but dare not: place the picture on exhibition. To show
the picture, the enemy said, would be to prove the artist's commonplace
quality, and not only this, but it would prove the man a rogue. They
declared he was incapable of perceiving the good qualities in a sitter,
and had consented for a price to portray a person whom he disliked; and
as a result, of course, had produced a caricature; and then had
blackmailed his patron into paying an outrageous sum to keep the picture
from the public.
The argument sounded plausible. And so the battle raged, just as it has
since in reference to Zola.
The tide of Meissonier's prosperity began to ebb: prospective buyers kept
away; those who had given commissions canceled them.
Meissonier's friends saw that something must be done. They inaugurated a
"Meissonier Vindication," by making an exhibition of one hundred
fifty-five "Meissoniers"--and the public was invited to come and be the
jury. Art-lovers from England went in bodies, and all Paris filed through
the gallery, as well as a goodly portion of provincial France. By the
side of each canvas stood a gendarme to protect it from a possible
fanatic whose artistic hate could not be restrained.
To a great degree this exhibition brought feeling to a normal condition.
Meissonier was still a great artist, yet he was human and his effects
were now believed to be gotten by natural methods. But there was a lull
in the mad rush to secure his wares. The Vanderbilts grew lukewarm;
titled connoisseurs from England were not so anxious; and Mrs. Mackay sat
back and smiled through her tears.
Meissonier had expended over a million francs on his house in the
Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, and nearly as much on the country-seat at
Poissy. These places were kingly in their appointments and such as only
the State should attempt to maintain. For a single man, by the work of
his right hand, to keep them up was too much to expect.
Meissonier's success had been too great. As a collector he had overdone
the thing. Only poor men, or those of moderate incomes, should be
collectors, for then the joy of sacrifice is theirs. Charles Lamb's
covetous looking on the book when it was red, daily for months, meanwhile
hoarding his pay, and at last one Saturday night swooping down and
carrying the volume home to Bridget in triumph, is the true type.
But money had come to Meissonier by hundreds of thousands of francs, and
often sums were forced upon him as advance payments. He lived royally and
never imagined that his hand and brain could lose their cunning, or the
public be fickle.
The fact that a "vindication" had been necessary was galling: the great
man grew irritable and his mood showed itself in his work: his colors
grew hard and metallic, and there were angles in his lines where there
should have been joyous curves.
Debts began to press. He painted less and busied his mind with
reminiscence--the solace of old age.
And then it was that he dictated to his wife the "Conversations." The
book reveals the quality of his mind with rare fidelity--and shows the
power of this second wife fully to comprehend him. Thus did she disprove
some of the unkind philosophy given to the world by her liege. But the
talk in the "Conversations" is of an old man in whose heart was a tinge
of bitterness. Yet the thought is often lofty and the comment clear and
full of flashing insight. It is the book of Ecclesiastes over again,
written in a minor key, with a little harmless gossip added for filling.
Meissonier died in Paris on the Twenty-first of January, Eighteen Hundred
Ninety-one, aged seventy-six years.
* * * * *
The canvas known as "Eighteen Hundred Seven," which is regarded as
Meissonier's masterpiece, has a permanent home in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York. The central figure is Napoleon, at whose shrine the
great artist loved to linger. The "Eighteen Hundred Seven" occupied the
artist's time and talent for fifteen years, and was purchased by A. T.
Stewart for sixty thousand dollars. After Mr. Stewart's death his art
treasures were sold at auction, and this canvas was bought by Judge Henry
Hilton and presented to the city of New York.
There are in all about seventy-five pictures by Meissonier owned in
America. Several of his pieces are in the Vanderbilt collection, others
are owned by collectors in Chicago, Cleveland and Saint Louis.
There are various glib sayings to the effect that the work of great men
is not appreciated until after they are dead. This may be so and it may
not. It depends upon the man and the age. Meissonier enjoyed full half a
century of the highest and most complete success that was ever bestowed
upon an artist.
The strong intellect and marked personality of the man won him friends
wherever he chose to make them; and it probably would have been better
for his art if a degree of public indifference had been his portion in
those earlier years. His success was too great: the calm judgment of
posterity can never quite endorse the plaudits paid the living man. He
is one of the greatest artists the Nineteenth Century has produced, but
that his name can rank among the great artists of all time is not at all
probable.
William Michael Rossetti has summed the matter up well by saying:
"Perfection is so rare in this world that when we find it we must pause
and pay it the tribute of our silent admiration. It is very easy to say
that Meissonier should have put in this and omitted that. Had he painted
differently he would have been some one else. The work is faultless, and
such genius as he showed must ever command the homage of those who know
by experience the supreme difficulty of having the hand materialize the
conceptions of the mind. And yet Meissonier's conceptions outmatched his
brush: he was greater than his work. He was a great artist, and better
still, a great man--proud, frank, fearless and conscientious."