The school of æsthetes, which maintains the principle of art for art’s sake, will, I grant, admit works of this sort as a form of Socialism, indeed, but not as a form of art. I do not belong to this school. I oppose it at all times and everywhere as strongly as I am able. I am convinced that art has a social mission which reaches far beyond mere gratification, that it must necessarily be moral, and, in the highest sense of the word, useful; not useful in the simple way of painted or chiselled aids to intelligence, not moral in the vulgar way of tracts; but moral through stimulating what is most human and noble in our spirit and soul, and useful through educating us to deeper and wider conceptions of phenomena. In one point, however, I agree with the heralds of _l’art pour l’art_—I demand beauty in a work of art; not beauty alone, but beauty in the first place. In order, then, that we can speak of a Socialistic art, the works that would deserve this designation must not only excite sympathy with the disinherited, and respect for the workman, but they must also arouse æsthetic feeling, they must be beautiful. This claim, of course, excludes no kind of beauty. The tragic is absolutely beautiful. Purification is one of the most powerful æsthetic influences. Truth can be beautiful if essential and expressive. The socialist who would prove himself an artist must possess the lucky gift to see and exhibit beauty in the figures and actions of the class of society for which his heart beats. All these conditions no contemporary artist known to me fulfils in the same degree as Constantin Meunier, the Belgian sculptor, painter, and draughtsman. Meunier died an old man in 1905. He was born in the ‘thirties’ of the last century. The world was slow to recognise him, not because he did not deserve recognition, but because he did not seek it. He was big and unassuming. He lived quietly in a little Belgian town as a teacher in an art school, and modestly avoided the roar of fame’s mart. He had even refused to allow the reproduction of one of his noble bronzes, for business purposes, by a first-rate Paris house which was prepared to pay a munificent price for the right of sale. He was loth that his piece should become a factory-cast and a shop-window article. He belongs to the narrowest circle of the blessed, of the chosen. He is one of the Prometheus-like artists; he informs and inspires life. He feels like a Samaritan, he thinks like an apostle of the submerged, who utters a great cry of wrath over the harshness and unrighteousness of the social scheme, and he compels the bronze, like a Benvenuto Cellini, translated from what was aristocratic and classic into that which is modern and democratic.