[Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ THE TOMB OF PRUDHON AND CONSTANCE MAYER AT PÈRE-LACHAISE.] In general, Prudhon was not a tragic painter; his preference was for the more joyous, light and dreamy, delicately veiled myths of the ancients. His misfortunes taught him to flee from reality, and on the wings of Art he saved himself, in the realm of legendary love and visionary happiness. So we see Psyche borne aloft by Zephyr through the twilight to the nuptial abode of Eros. A soft light falls upon her snowy body; her head has fallen upon her shoulder, and one arm, bent backwards, enframes her face. Silent like a cloud, the group moves onward--a sweet-scented apparition from fairyland. Now, enraptured genii visit the slumbering Fair One in forest-shadows, under the shimmering moon; now she is stealing secretly down to bathe in a tranquil lake, and gazes with astonishment upon her own likeness in the gloomy mirror. Here Venus, drawing deep breaths of secret bliss, is seated, full of longing love, by the side of Adonis. Who else, at that time, could draw nude figures of such faultless beauty, so slender and pure, with lines so supple and yet so firm, and enveloped in so full and soft a light? Or again, he paints Zephyr swinging roguishly by the side of a stream. A gentle breeze plays through his locks, and the cool darkness of the wood breathes through all things round. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ PRUDHON. THE UNFORTUNATE FAMILY.] Prudhon's work is never a laborious patchwork of fragments of antique forms picked up here and there, never the insipid product of the reason working in accordance with recipes long handed down; it is thoroughly intuitive. Never keeping too closely to his model, he gave to his creations the movement and the divine breath of life. In his hands with dreamlike fidelity the Antique rose up again renewed, new in the sense of his own completely modern sentiment, and in that of those great masters of the Renaissance who had wakened it to life three hundred years before. For Prudhon, as is shown by his landscape backgrounds, is altogether Jean Jacques Rousseau's contemporary, the child of that epoch in which Nature revealed itself anew; and, as is proved by his figures, he is a congenial spirit to Antonio da Allegri and Vinci. In fresh recollection of Correggio, he loves a soft exuberance of flesh and a delicate semi-obscurity; in enthusiastic reverence for Leonardo, those heads of women, with deep, sensuously veiled eyes, and that mysterious delicate smile playing dreamily round the wanton mouth. Only, the enchanting sweetness of the Florentine and the delicious ecstasy of the Lombard are toned down by a gentle melancholy which is entirely modern. The Psyche borne up to heaven by Zephyr changes in the end, when purified and refined, into the soul itself, which, in the form of the Madonna, ascends into heaven, transfigured with longing desire; and