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?

As Canaille Mauclair says: "Carrière was first influenced by the
Spaniards, then by Ver Meer and Chardin ... formerly he coloured his
canvas with exquisite delicacy and with a distinction of harmonies
that came very near to Whistler's. Now he confines himself to bistre,
black and white, to evoke those dream pictures, true images of souls,
which make him inimitable in our epoch and go back to Rembrandt's
chiaroscuro." Colour went by the board at the last, and the painter
was dominated by expression alone. His gamut of tones became
contracted. "Physical magnetism" is exactly the phrase that
illuminates his later methods. Often cavernous in tone, sooty in his
blacks, he nevertheless contrives a fluid atmosphere, the shadows
floating, the figure floating, that arrests instant attention. He
became almost sculptural, handled his planes with imposing breadth,
his sense of values was strong, his gradations and degradation of
tones masterly; and he escaped the influences of the new men in their
researches after luminosity at all hazards. He considered
impressionism a transition; after purifying muddy palettes of the
academics, the division-of-tones painters must necessarily return to
lofty composition, to a poetic simplicity with nature, to a more
rarefied psychology.

Carrière, notwithstanding his nocturnal reveries, his sombre
colouring, was not a pessimist. Indeed, the reverse. His philosophy of
life was exalted--an exalted socialism. He was, to employ Nietzsche's
pithy phrase, a "Yes-Sayer"; he said "Yes" to the universe. A man of