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The great man usually differs from the ordinary man only in his one greatness. On many sides he may be a very commonplace man, a petty man, but on his great side he is so far

CEZANNE

Portrait of Self

CÉZANNE

Village Street

out of the ordinary that it is almost impossible to understand him close to. The fact that he is doing things in an extra-ordinary way causes us instinctively to distrust and condemn him.

One of the early buyers of Impressionist pictures was a distinguished Chicago woman, and her collection today contains some of the finest Monets, Renoirs, and Degases in existence. When her friends heard she had bought some forty or fifty Monets they shook their heads in dismay at such folly. This was not many years ago, less than thirty, and now the pictures are in demand the world over and worth ten, fifteen, twenty times what they cost.

The same ladies and gentlemen who shook their heads at the Monets in 1890 shook their heads at the Cubists in 1913. If they live another quarter of a century they will once more shake their heads at the new art of that day—for such is life.