[  238  ]
the common sense, of genius. We may see this
further operating in still another phase of his
thought.
La Farge's attitude toward the whole ques-
tion of the criticism of art was very much that
of the mature master who is also a man of the
world. Like every man of genius he went his
way untroubled by external admonition; he
knew he could trust the still small voice of his
own instinct. But the intellectual nature of his
artistic habit made him fully appreciative of
the importance of criticism as criticism, and
he had not the smallest trace of that jealousy
of the writing profession which characterizes
so many artists and has its most famous ex-
emplar in Whistler. Jf hp- reaU^r.wkkJ;har
gay-dogmatist^-that art4s-ar4-and rrrathematics
is-jnathematicsj4t<lid notlceep himfkwfrrec-
ognizing -the- value-of -a~penetrating~thoright
wherevei^4ie-found~Tr: He read with intense
sympathy what painters have said about their
art, he read Delacroix and Fromentin,— and
Whistler, too,—but then he read everything,
and he would have scorned to reject the sound
saying of a layman just as he would have
smiled, as, indeed, I have known him to smile,
over the naïve hypothesis that any artist, by the