being false to his own conception. Casimir has only one principle in art, as in life, and that is that it is one's duty to progress in the direction in which one's temperament has foreordained that one shall go: that any road leads to truth provided you walk far enough on it."
"It must be difficult," said Grover, "to recognize another man's direction and give him advice that will help him to progress in it, rather than divert him into your own direction."
For the first time since they had met, Vaudreuil looked at him with a gleam of cordiality, as though recognizing a vein of intelligence that saved the encounter from being a total loss. "That's precisely why most art and most teaching is futile," he exclaimed. "Most painters and most teachers are so enchanted in giving birth to one idea that they nurse it to death. It's only the rare man who fathers a whole progressive family of ideas and who can be at the same time a good godfather to the ideas of others. Every artist must resist the temptation to be a moralist; that is the besetting sin of Anglo-Saxons. Casimir is the unwilling and almost unwitting centre of a cult that has no more to do with his real contribution to art than it has to do with Mohammedanism. Ten years ago, in one of his experimental moods, he happened to paint a picture of a lightning storm. It was a canvas with certain merits and certain defects. It caused a violent altercation among the critics, who
