itself in a revolutionary effort—however peculiarly, nay, perversely, it might impress—the intelligent man will not condemn, but wait to see if something living comes from the attempt. If the practised eye, however, recognises, in the peculiarity, either a cunning imitation or a cold-blooded, intentional oddity, then one may confidently pronounce the death sentence, for it contains in itself no germs whatever of development. The only two eternal sources of art are, and will be, feeling for nature and personality. Fidelity to nature and honesty produce living creations. Unnaturalness and affectation are marks of decay. He who ever holds fast to these simple dicta will hardly ever run the risk of mistaking a Will-o’-the-Wisp for a lighthouse, or what is morally, if not practically, a more serious error, of treading under foot an insignificant chrysalis with the living and beautiful butterfly it enshrines. Even of the manifestations of insanity of crack-brained painters, of the hoaxes of tricky strugglers for success, and the whims of childishly immature and childishly careless people living from hand to mouth, who have sprung up in the last two or three decades, the good man’s insinuating word of the “sound kernel,” of the “tendencies, capable of development, to a new blossoming of art,” has been spoken by the opportunistic of critics. Well, time has now given the answer to these verdicts, at any rate in regard to some of the movements for which those prophets so benevolently predicted a glorious future. Fifteen or twenty years ago we saw in the Paris Salon, beside the expressionless fabrications of the usual daubing artisans—the “Mother’s Joys,” the “Young Lady at her Toilet,” the “Oyster with Lemons,” which constitute the stock in trade of all exhibitions of pictures—only two formulæ appear in hundreds of repetitions: the vulgarly realistic, after the style, let us say—to mention a particular name—of Bastien Lepage, that pupil of Cabanel who had degenerated into an apostle of Courbet; and the pseudo-idealistic, after the model of Puvis de Chavannes. Workmen with brutalised countenances and greasy blouses, and unearthly figures in antiquated landscapes of chalky paleness, disputed the visitor’s attention. A concreteness which did not spare us a single finger-nail in mourning, struggled for supremacy with a careless vagueness which styled itself “Abstraction” or “Synthesis” and produced only questionably schematic types. Whole walls exhibited unbroken rows of pictures which reminded us of the spectral ballet of the dead nuns in “Robert the Devil.” Then we came to rooms where an unmixed company of rag-pickers, and night-men exercising their calling, of huzzies on the night-prowl, dung-carting stable-helps, and rapscallions at loggerheads, were quite at home. One of these movements, _i.e._, painting in faint colours, has hardly a representative left; the other—the art of vulgarity, meanness, and ugliness—only a dwindling few.