It is thoughtlessness when we imitate forms that are suited to a particular material in a quite different material, simply because we are used to the sight of them. The far-famed Greek temple architecture is largely a result of this thoughtlessness: it slavishly imitates in stone the wooden architecture, the place of which it has taken; it retains the beams with projecting beam-heads and cross-braces that have neither object nor meaning in stone. To the same category belong the tablets, with manifold curled up and twisted edges, which the Renaissance and the Rococo executed in stone and wood, although they have no sense or justification except in sheet metal: the contemporary Moscow silver-work, which imitate painfully enough damask linen with Russo-Byzantine coloured embroidery, or cakes and black-bread in precious metals or enamel: the marble veils, lace garments, and knitted stockings of the North-Italian sculptors of the decadence, etc. It is mental inertia when we mechanically persist in repeating forms which either are unfitted for a given object, or have lost all meaning. For two thousand years artists of all sorts have made a decorative use of acanthus leaves in countries where no human eye has ever had an acanthus leaf before it. The Middle Ages decorated with a whole menagerie of beasts from Asia and Africa, which they knew only from fables, foreign textures, and pictures. From imitation to imitation the outlines, which no comparison with the actual model corrected and restored to accuracy, became more inexact and grotesque. Thus arose acanthus capitals which are more like rough logs than the elegantly curled plant, and heraldic lions and leopards, in which no feature any longer reminds us of the great cats. This is then called improving upon the natural form, and people even discover a particular beauty in it: a striking proof of the ability of mankind to make a virtue out of necessity. For the so-called stylisation is conscious and intentional only in late conservative imitation. It arises, however, quite involuntarily through unintelligent imitation of a pattern that is incorrectly felt and grasped, because one has never known its living model. So, too, the whole mythology of the Greeks still haunts our present-day decoration, which mythology was to the Greek artists a part of their living feeling and religious conviction, whilst to-day it has lost all thought and feeling. What can Neptune’s trident, Orpheus’ lyre, the Sirens and the Centaur, the Sphynx and the Gorgon, signify to a son of this century? But whilst these bits of inherited form wander from one imitator to another, until they become hopelessly unrecognisable, they gain a beauty of another sort which they did not originally possess: the venerable spell of antiquity surrounds them, and this charm, in its turn, touches certain susceptibilities of the soul, the inclination to mystic, twilight conceptions of what is remote