Fashion is of the nature of an aperient. It is a patent stimulus of use only to the constipated and the sluggish. It is the specific for the fifth rate, to correct the stagnations that are perpetually gathering where life is poor and inactive. The Victorian age produced a morass of sugary comfort and amiableness, indulged men so much that they became guys of sentiment. Against this “sentimentality” people of course reacted. So the brutal tap was turned on, and for fifty years it will be the thing to be brutal, “unemotional.” Against the absurdities that this “inhuman” fashion does inevitably breed, you will need some powerful corrective in due course. And so your fashions go, a matter of the cold or the hot tap, simply. The majority of people, the Intellectuals, the Art World, are perpetually in some raw extreme. They are “of their time” as a man is typically of his country, truculently Prussian or delightfully French. So there are some people who like cold in its place and hot in its place, cold and hot out of their place, or the bath mixed to some exact nuance. Actually how it works out is that Cézanne, André Dérain, Giotto, the best stone carver of the VII. dynasty in Egypt, the Hottentot of talent, are far more alike and nearer to each other in their reactions, than any well-defined type man of the contiguous ages of Queen Victoria and George V., with sixty years only separating them. It is at no time unnecessary to point out that what takes the glamour and starch out of the Chinese pigtail and the white hood of the Carmelite is when the pigtail proceeds from the scalp of Lao-Tse and the nun’s coif surrounds the adorable features of Saint Theresa. East is East and West is West, and at a Macaroni meeting a post-Georgian swell would bristle with horror, and behave as the cat and the dog. But some men have the luck to possess a considerable release from these material attachments, and a powerful ear that enables them, like a woman in a restaurant, to overhear the conversations at all the neighbouring tables; to gaze at a number of revolutions at once, and catch the static and unvarying eye of Aristotle, a few revolutions away, or the later and more heterodox orb of Christ. PART III _Paris_ _Section_ 1. _French Realism._ ” 2. _The Uses of Fashion._ ” 3. _Cézanne._ ” 4. _The General Tendency in Paris._ ” 5. _Matisse and Dérain._ ” 6. _Picasso._ _French Realism_