Then comes the gleaming autumn of the style. Once more the soul depicts its happiness, this time conscious of self-completion. The “return to Nature” which already thinkers and poets—Rousseau, Gorgias and their “contemporaries” in the other Cultures—begin to feel and to proclaim, reveals itself in the form-world of the arts as a sensitive longing and _presentiment of the end_. A perfectly clear intellect, joyous urbanity, the sorrow of a parting—these are the colours of these last Culture- decades of which Talleyrand was to remark later: “Qui n’a pas vécu avant 1789 ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre.” So it was, too, with the free, sunny and superfine art of Egypt under Sesostris III (c. 1850 B.C.) and the brief moments of satiated happiness that produced the varied splendour of Pericles’s Acropolis and the works of Zeuxis and Phidias. A thousand years later again, in the age of the Ommaiyads, we meet it in the glad fairyland of Moorish architecture with its fragile columns and horseshoe arches that seem to melt into air in an iridescence of arabesques and stalactites. A thousand years more, and we see it in the music of Haydn and Mozart, in Dresden shepherdesses, in the pictures of Watteau and Guardi, and the works of German master-builders at Dresden, Potsdam, Würzburg and Vienna. Then the style fades out. The form-language of the Erechtheum and the Dresden Zwinger, honeycombed with intellect, fragile, ready for self- destruction, is followed by the flat and senile Classicism that we find in the Hellenistic megalopolis, the Byzantium of 900 and the “Empire” modes of the North. The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a moment by pedant or by eclectic—semi-earnestness and doubtful genuineness dominate the world of the arts. We to-day are in this condition—playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion of a living art. IX