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But like the moral conscience it can be dallied with until the grieved spirit turns away, and the wretch is left to his fate.

Meissonier never hesitated to erase a whole picture when it did not satisfy his inward sense–customers might praise and connoisseurs offer to buy, it made no difference. “I have some one who is more difficult to please than you,” he would say; “I must satisfy myself.”

The fine intoxication that follows good artistic work is the highest joy that mortals ever know. But once let a creative artist lower his standard and give the world the mere product of his brain, with heart left out, that man will hate himself for a year and a day. He has sold his soul for a price: joy has flown, and bitterness is his portion. Meissonier never trifled with his compass. To the last he headed for the polestar.

* * * * *

The early domestic affairs of Meissonier can best be guessed from his oft-repeated assertion that the artist should never marry. “To produce great work, Art must be your mistress,” he said. “You must be married to your work. A wife demands unswerving loyalty as her right, and a portion of her husband’s time she considers her own. This is proper with every profession but that of Art. The artist must not be restrained, nor should even a wife come between him and his Art. The artist must not be judged by the same standards that are made for other men. Why? Simply because when you begin to tether him you cramp his imagination and paralyze his hand. The priest and artist must not marry, for it is too much to expect any woman to follow them in their flight, and they have no moral right to tie themselves to a woman and then ask her to stay behind.”

From this and many similar passages in the “Conversations” it is clear that Meissonier had no conception of the fact that a woman may possibly keep step with her mate. He simply never considered such a thing.

A man’s opinions concerning womankind are based upon the knowledge of the women he knows best.

We can not apply Hamerton’s remark concerning Turner to Meissonier. Hamerton said that throughout Turner’s long life he was lamentably unfortunate in that he never came under the influence of a strong and good woman.

Meissonier associated with good women, but he never knew one with a spread of spiritual wing sufficient to fit her to be his companion. There is a minor key of loneliness and heart hunger running through his whole career. Possibly, in the wisdom of Providence, this was just what he needed to urge him on to higher and nobler ends. He never knew peace, and the rest for which he sighed slipped him at the very last. “I’m tired, so tired,” he sighed again and again in those later years, when he had reached the highest pinnacle.

And still he worked–it was his only rest! Meissonier painted very few pictures of women, and in some miraculous way skipped that stage in esthetic evolution wherein most artists affect the nude. In his whole career he never produced a single “Diana,” nor a “Susanna at the Bath.” He had no artistic sympathy with “Leda and the Swan,” and once when Delaroche chided him for painting no pictures of women, he was so ungallant as to say, “My dear fellow, men are much more beautiful than women!”

During the last decade of his life Meissonier painted but one portrait of a woman, and to America belongs the honor. The sitter was Mrs. J. W. Mackay, of California.

As all the world knows, Mrs. Mackay refused to accept the canvas. She declared the picture was no likeness, and further, she would not have it for a gift.