Ah! old Ossifus, your erudition is but the husk of my spirit. And my spirit is the shop-boy whistling on his way to work, joyous without reason for you have proved him an economic slave, stunted and damned forever to rot in chains. My spirit is the lover going to his ruin-woman, and tumbling out of heaven with a laugh. Ho! ho! old Petrifus, you have proved her the root of evil, the despoiler of greatness, the velvet vandal of illusions, and yet and yet.... And he is the artist running wild in the china-closet of the past. Have you anything sacred, old whiskers? Have you something labelled right and something labelled wrong? Show it to him. He will do for it. He is the eternal monster killing the dead. There is no beauty but youth. There is no beauty in age. Ho! you doddering banality with the superior tolerance in your stutter, you are decomposing on your feet. Age is soiled. Age is dirty. Age drips with the phlegm of life. Age is the unclean residue in the cup. Ho!—there is no tomorrow. Blessed are the young in heart for they shall be God. “A. E. D.” Henri and Manship One grows weary of the quibbling, the petty running about in circles of critics, would-be-critics, and students with the eyes of their teachers disputing “techniques,” values, and standards in regard to paintings that somehow seem to live outside any limits pedants have placed. Out from the noise the voice of the artist arises with a strength and clearness in words similar to the quality of his paintings. Writing in the February _Craftsman_ of this year, telling of his work, his ideas, and his “people,” Robert Henri has this to say: “My love of mankind is individual. I am patriotic only about what I admire, and my devotion to humanity burns as brightly for Europe as for America. It flames up swiftly for Mexico if I am painting the peon there; it warms towards the bull fighter of Spain if in spite of its cruelty there is that element in his art which I find beautiful; it intensifies before the Irish peasant whose love, poetry, simplicity, and humor have enriched my existence just as completely as though these people were of my own country and my own hearthstone. Everywhere I see at times this beautiful expression of the dignity of life to which I respond with a wish to preserve this beauty of humanity for my friends to enjoy.... The Chinese American girl who has found coquetry in new freedom; the peon, a symbol of a destroyed civilization in Mexico, and the Indian who works as one in slavery and dreams as a man in still places ... all their lives are in their expression, in their eyes, their movements or they are not worth translating into art.” He very simply tells what he feels about technique, which ought to quiet the objection to his or any individual’s methods: