A dark, chilly December afternoon. The rain falls in thin, straight lines on the streets of New York, and the lighted shop windows are reflected, like some blurred and golden dream, on the slushy pavement.

You mount the slippery iron stairs of a humble and reticent office-building on Fifth Avenue. To the Negro, who comes to your ring, you say: "Mr. Steichen." He takes you to the top floor, and carelessly, indifferently, as one points to a door, he points to the right. "Right in there, sir," he says.

You knock at the door. It is Mr. Steichen who admits you. It is a plain little room, without skylight, but with an artistic atmosphere of its own. The first impression is one of cool grays and pale terra-cotta, a studio void of furniture, but full of artistic accessories — a vagrom place, where a sort of orderly disorder, a sort of gypsy fashion prevails. The light of the waning day seems to rest in the center of the walls, while the corners are filled with twilight shadows, whose monotony is only here and there relieved by the color-notes of a Japanese lantern, a large glass vessel, or some other quaint accessory. A little plaster fragment of one of Rodin's statues hands in proud isolation over the mantlepiece.

Mr. Steichen looms tall among his canvases, his arms crossed. With his square shoulders, his pallid, angular face, his dark, disheveled hair, his steady eyes, he reminds one of some old statue carved of wood, a quaint personality which has at times the air of some classical visionary, "a modern citizen of Calais," and at other times the deportment of some gallant figure of Sir Reynold's time.

He showed me his paintings, sketches, and photographs in rapid succession, which is one of the ordeals an art critic has to go through if he wants to become acquainted with a new man. I have probably passed through this severe experience oftener than any other man. I remember having visited at least four hundred and fifty American studios for a similar purpose -- as I have convinced myself that it is the only way to get at a man's individuality. And art criticism is to me nothing but a peculiar mania for searching in every expression of art, and life as well, for its most individual, perhaps innermost, essence.

Biographical data do not interest me. What is the difference where a man is born, how old he is, where he studied, and where he was medaled? His art must speak -- that is all I care for.

The first picture that attracted my attention in Steichen's studio was his Beethoven. It is all black and gray, huge and grim (although no canvass of colossal size) almost Doric in its severity. Everything is sacrificed to the idea, a study in the somber supremacy of genius and the martyrdom of the artist. It is Beethoven of the Fifth, not of the Ninth Symphony. It contains more strength and power than beauty. The simplicity of its composition is remarkable. This dark pyramidal shape of a seated figure, harsh and angular, as if cast in iron, crowned by a pale, apocalyptic face, is seen against a slab of greyish stone, whose monotony is scarcely broken by a vista of dark, twisted tree-trunks in the upper corners. The face, haggard as a ghost of Dante's Inferno, makes one think of stormy, tortuous nights, of sinister shadows trailing obstinately along the ground. It is a picture barbaric as the clangor of iron chains against each other, the only attempt of the young painter in the epic field. It presents Steichen at the height of his ambition, but being a solitary effort, it is difficult to judge the artist's individuality solely from this exalted point of view. One cannot fully grasp his intentions, and it is very likely that he is not conscious of them himself.

In his landscapes, he reveals himself much more clearly. He has created a world of his own, but one based on actual things, translated into dreams. The rain still falls in thin straight lines upon the blurred symphony of black and gold that glistens and glimmers on the wet pavements of Fifth Avenue, and there seems to be something analogous in the vertical lines of Steichen's landscapes and the gray lines of the rain outside. Nobody has carried the composition of lines further than Mr. Steichen. All his pictures are composed in vertical, diagonal, and outer-twisting line work, but the lines are not as distinct and scientific as in Chavannes' or Tryon's pictures. They are not outlines, they only serve as accentuations. He endows each line with a mystic quality, and they run like some strange rune through his tonal composition. French critics have compared his pictures with musical compositions, but I beg to differ. To me all his tree-trunks, whether ethereally thin, repeating their wavering lines in some moon-hazed water, or crudely massive, towering into some dismal twilight atmosphere, are purely decorative. In order to be musical, the line composition has to serve as outlines for the color-patches which should in turn repeat or accentuate the motive of the spacing. In Steichen's pictures color is always subordinate to one tonal value, and the dominating idea is rather the expression of a single sentiment than the varying subtleties of a musical theme.

To me Steichen is a poet of rare depth and significance, who expresses his dreams, as does Maeterlinck, by surface decoration, and with the simplest of images — for instance, a vague vista of some nocturnal landscape seen through various clusters of branches, or a group of beech-and birch-trees, whose bark forms a quaint mosaic of horizontal color suggestions — can add something to our consciousness of life. His lines, blurred and indistinct as they generally are, are surprisingly eloquent and rhythmical. They become with him as suggestive as the dividing-line of some sad woman's lips, as fragile as some tremulous flower-branch writing strange hieroglyphics on the pale-blue sky, or as mystic as the visionary forms which rise in our mind's eye, as we peer through the prison-bars of modern life into some nocturnal landscape or twilight atmosphere. The only fault that I can find with his landscapes, as with the majority of his pictures, is that they are not finished pictures. They are sketches. A mere suggestion suffices for him. It is left to the imagination of the spectator to carry them out to their full mental realization.

There are many other pictures of interest, mixtures of fantasy and reality clearly characteristic of the gifts and methods of Steichen. I mention some at random. A violent color-study of a sailor, reclining, with a red bowl in his hand; the heads of four Parisian types; an old man; an artist with his model supposed to be crossing one of the Seine bridges, with the silhouette of another bridge, and a vague suggestion of the Louvre in the background; the sphinx-like profile of some phantom woman; portraits of F. H. Day and Mrs. Käsebier; and color-schemes of various types of womanhood, one of a young girl and another of a woman of the world. The manner in which he used flowers to tell the characters of his sitters (in the latter portraits) shows how deeply he can read into the human soul. The young girl folds her hands listlessly around a large round flower with a straight stem, the other flowers resting in a long and narrow vase; while the woman of fashion throws a weary glance at the few pink blossoms which loom from some large, round vase and which repeat the color-note of her face.

To look immediately at monotypes after you have looked at a lot of paintings would prove in most cases very disastrous to the former. But, strange to say, Steichen's photographs hold their own. It proved to me once more that in art the method of expression matters naught; that eery effort, no matter in what medium, may become a work of art provided it manifests with utmost sincerity and intensity the emotions of a man face to face with nature and life.

The artistic photograph answers better than any other graphic art to the special necessities of a democratic and leveling age like ours. I believe this, besides some technical charms like the solidity of dark tones and the facility with which forms can be lost in shadows, is the principal reason why Steichen has chosen it as one of his mediums of expression.

He never relies upon accidents; he employs in his photographic portraits the same creative faculty which he employs in his paintings. That is the secret of his success. Look at his portraits of Lenbach, Stuck, Watts, Maeterlinck, Besnard, Bartholomé, and Rodin. In each, with the exception of Maeterlinck -- and Maeterlinck's face seems to be one of those which do not lend themselves to pictorial representation, being too subtle, perhaps -- he has fully grasped the sitter's personality. Lenbach he has treated like a "Lenbach," with the light-effects of an old master and with copious detail bristling with intellectuality, such as the Munich master is apt to use in all his important portraits. The Stuck portrait is full of riotous technique, with a bravado touch in the white glare in the corner of the eyes. This is a man often vulgar and crude, but with healthy blood in his veins -- an artist personifying the storm and stress element in genre art. How calm and dignified in comparison is Steichen's handling of Watts! And then, again, his Besnard, direct and realistic, and yet unforeseen it its effect. The treatment of the big fur mantle, with which the bulky form of the painter is clad, is symbolical of his tumultuous technique, and the burst of light behind the curtains suggestive of Besnard color-orgies in violent yellows, blues, and reds. The Bartholomé is deficient in composition, the Greek column against which the sculptor is leaning and the huge caryatid, which he is contemplating and which fills the rest of the picture, are too obtrusive, and yet they intimate the dreams of the poet of form, with their mixed savor of the modern and archaic.

But the masterpiece of this collection is the Rodin. It cannot be improved upon. It is a portrait of Rodin, of the man as well as his art, and to me by far more satisfactory than Alexander's portrait of the French sculptor, excellent as it is. It is a whole man's life condensed into a simple silhouette, but a silhouette of somber splendor, powerful and personal, against a vast background, where black and white seem to struggle for supremacy. This print should, once and for all, end all dispute whether artistic photography is a process indicative of decadence, an impression under which so many people and most artists will seem to labor. A medium, so rich and so complete, one in which such a masterpiece can be achieved, the world can no longer ignore. The battle is won!

But it is getting late. Only a few more words about Mr. Steichen's nudes.

"These nudes nobody seems to understand." Mr. Steichen remarks. "So they mean anything to you?" It has grown dark and the rain is still tapping, curiously and faintly, at the window panes.

My answer is a smile. He does not know that my whole life has been a fight for the nude, for liberty of thought in literature and art, and how I silently rejoice when I meet a man with convictions similar to mine.

Steichen's photographic nudes are not as perfect as the majority of his portraits, but they contain perhaps the best and noblest aspirations of his artistic nature. They are absolutely incomprehensible to the crowd.

To him the naked body, as to any true lover of the nude, contains the ideals, both of mysticism and beauty. Their bodies are no paeans of the flesh nor do they proclaim absolutely the purity of nudity. Steichen's nudes are a strange procession of female forms, naive, non-moral, almost sexless, with shy, furtive movements, groping with their arms mysteriously in the air or assuming attitudes commonplace enough but imbued with some mystic meaning, with the light concentrated on their thighs, their arms, or the back, while the rest of the body is drowned in darkness.

What does this all mean? Futile question. Can you explain the melancholy beauty of the falling rain, or tell why the slushy pavements, reflecting the glaring light of Fifth Avenue stores, reminds us of the golden dreams the poets dream?

I seize my umbrella and say "Good night" indifferently as I might say it to any stranger, and he answers absent-mindedly "Come again!" He is thinking of his soul, and I am thinking of mine. What a foolish occupation is this busy, practical world of ours!