"I have three pictures," he said, "that I did the first six months I was here; they—"
"Yes, I know," I interrupted. "One was at last year's Salon, and one at the World's Fair, and the other took a prize at Munich. Is that all?"
He flushed a little, and laughed, and said, "Yes, that is all."
"Do you get much inspiration here?" I asked, pointing to the colored fountain and the piles of luggage and the ugly glass roof.
"I don't understand you," he said.
He put the card he had held out to me back in his case, and bowed grandly, and walked back to the girl he had left at one of the tables, and on my way out from the offices I saw him frowning into a glass before him. The girl was pulling him by the sleeve, but he apparently was not listening.
The American artist who has taken Paris properly has only kind words to speak of her. He is grateful for what she gave him, but he is not unmindful of his mother-country at home. He may complain when he returns of the mud in our streets, and the height of our seventeen-story buildings, and the ugliness of our elevated roads—and who does not? But if his own art is lasting and there is in his heart much constancy, his work will grow and continue in spite of these things, and will not droop from the lack of atmosphere about him. New York and every great city owns a number of these men who have studied in the French capital, and who speak of it as fondly as a man speaks of his college and of the years he spent there. They help to leaven the lump and to instruct others who have not had the chance that was given them to see and to learn of all these beautiful things. These are the men who made the Columbian Fair what it was, who taught their teacher and the whole world a lesson in what was possible in architecture and in statuary, in decoration and design. That was a much better and a much finer thing for them to have done than to have dragged on in Paris waiting for a ribbon or a medal. They are the best examples we have of the Americans who made use of Paris, instead of permitting Paris to make use of them. And because they did the one thing and avoided the other, they are now helping and enlightening their own people and a whole nation, and not selfishly waiting in a foreign capital for a place on a jury for themselves.
THE END