in time and place, the pleasurable feeling of comfortable persistance in that to which we are accustomed, the connection of the familiar and always known with the remembrance of all strong impressions, both happy and unhappy, of childhood and youth. This mystico-archaic and subjectively sentimental element, which occurs in every style handed down traditionally, furnishes it with fanatical devotees whom its original decorative value could never win. That is, if I may say so, the religious side of the feeling for, and appreciation of, style. From the oppressive mass of material, which I must, for the most part, leave untouched, I am afraid I must deal with only one more question:—Is there a new style? Is the so-called “Secessionism” a style which characterises our time, or, perhaps, a fugitive moment of our time? He who has attentively observed the later exhibitions on this point will be bound to say “No” decisively. Household furniture and room decoration of the “secessionist” order are tortured into appearing new and original; but they are neither the one nor the other, but a patient, methodical eclecticism which aims at the influence of what is foreign and peculiar. We distinguish accurately that rooms built and painted in the secession style are patched together of Chinese motives, with an addition of Loie Fuller’s serpentine twistings, and that secessionist furniture imitates, in good wood and metal, the slenderness, knottiness, and pliancy of bamboos. The secession contains a very minute percentage of independent invention and a great many reminiscences of Eastern Asia. The West European style, which should ostensibly be the expression of the latest high European tendencies, is, in reality, Chinese and Japanese style, exaggerated by absurdity of form and assumed or real delirium. IV THE OLD FRENCH MASTERS We must once more change our method of study. That is the immediate result of the Exhibition of Old French artists—painters, draughtsmen, enamellers, sculptors—which, in 1904, in the Pavilion de Marsan at the Louvre, brought together several hundred fascinating, and perhaps half a dozen overpowering works. With the proofs furnished by these masterpieces full of earnestness and beauty, a chapter in the history of French and European art will have to be rewritten—not, to be sure, altogether in the sense intended and proclaimed by those who prepared this exceedingly important arrangement.