The requirements of construction and of human habitation cannot easily be met without sometimes using the forms which past experience has developed for the same ends; and the negation of precedent is not the surest path to beauty or even reasonableness of design. It is interesting to notice that in the intermediate field of furniture-design some of the best French productions recall the style of Louis XV., modified by Japanese ideas and spirit. This singular but not unpleasing combination is less surprising when we reflect that the style of Louis XV. was itself a protest against the formalism of the heavy classic architecture of preceding reigns, and achieved its highest successes in the domain of furniture and interior decoration. It may be fair to credit the new movement with one positive characteristic in its prevalent regard for line, especially for the effect of long and swaying lines, whether in the contours or ornamentation of an object. This is especially noticeable in the Belgian work, and in that of the Viennese “Secessionists,” who have, however, carried eccentricity to a further point of extravagance than any others. Whether “L’Art Nouveau” will ever produce permanent results time alone can show. Its present vogue is probably evanescent and it cannot claim to have produced a style; but it seems likely to exert on European architecture an influence, direct and indirect, not unlike that of the Néo-Grec movement of 1830 in France (p. 364), but even more lasting and beneficial. It has already begun to break the hold of rigid classical tradition in design; and recent buildings, especially in Germany and Austria, like the works of the brilliant _Otto Wagner_ in Vienna, show a pleasing freedom of personal touch without undue striving after eccentric novelty. Doubtless in French and other European architecture the same result will in time manifest itself. The search for novelty and the desire to dispense wholly with historic forms of design which are the chief marks of the Art Nouveau, were emphatically displayed in many of the remarkable buildings of the Paris +Exhibition of 1900+, in which a striking fertility and facility of design in the decorative details made more conspicuous the failure to improve upon the established precedents of architectural style in the matters of proportion, scale, general composition, and contour. As usual the metallic construction of these buildings was almost without exception admirable, and the decorative details, taken by themselves, extremely clever and often beautiful, but the combined result was not satisfactory.