That is the cosmic view held by an artist on the threshold of the twentieth century. Holbein and his predecessors in painting the Dance of Death were men who believed in Christianity, but the only consolation that they offered mortals was this: Don’t bewail your mortal lot, you share it with Pope and Emperor. The path from the Rationalism of this exhortation to the mysticism of Bartholomé’s dogma is called by the decadents Progress. The decadents are consistent when they call Bartholomé a modern, one of the most modern, and hail his work as the art of the future. It is logically on a line with the “progress” and “modernism” of a Huysmans, Maeterlinck, Bourget, and other New Catholics. But what is to be said about the city of Paris having this unctuous work erected in Père Lachaise? Had the Moscow Duma done it, everybody would have found it natural. But the Paris Municipal Council! This society of boasting freethinkers which has banished the Cross from the schools and churchyards, hounded the Sisters of Mercy from the hospitals, has the dogma of the Resurrection preached officially! That is the highly interesting ethical side of this work. It reveals monumentally the confusion in the donkey-heads of the self-styled freethinkers. That they should decree the honour of a public site to a composition of a dogmatically religious character is proof of crass ignorance of their own standpoint, or else of their hypocrisy. I prefer to assume it to be their ignorance. XV JEAN CARRIÈS The little palace, the charming edifice which was already attractive as the abode of the Dutuit collection, has received a new value and consecration. A room has been opened in it, in which a great artist reveals himself, whose acquaintance, though not indeed quite exhaustively, but nevertheless very profoundly and familiarly, can be made only here in the wide world. This artist is Jean Carriès, who died in 1894, at the early age of thirty-nine, after a marvellously planned life. To this pattern life, as expressive as any whose story Vasari has told, belonged a patron who kept what is vulgar away from him, who saved him from care and anxiety, who made his mind easy as to his influence on contemporaries and posterity, and, to a certain extent, symbolically personified his fame for him. This useful part was played by a certain Herr Hoentschel, who acquired most of Carriès’s works. He has now presented them to the City of Paris, and, by so doing, rendered the opening of the Carriès Museum possible. In return his name has been engraved in letters of gold on the marble slab which declares the purpose to which the room has been assigned, beside that of his trusted artist—no mean satisfaction to a high-aiming ambition.