from those models just so far as is necessary for the continuous stream of æsthetic evolution. The work of each generation is based on the teaching of the last, which it usually slightly improves, and hands on the improvement to its successors.

Now our modern art is derived, through the Renaissance, from the mediæval and classical schools. Ever since the early Italian revival, there has been, on the whole, a constant tendency for art to become more and more imitative, less and less decorative. Whatever may have been the practice of painters, they have always set forth as their theoretical principle the direct imitation of nature. The intellectual pleasure of accurate representation has gained ground daily over the sensuous pleasure of direct chromatic stimulation. But the tradition of the older schools has not yet wholly died away, nor is the artistic public prepared to let it die away. The critical principle that art ought to be more beautiful than nature is still tacitly held, though not always openly expressed, by most of our painters and critics. In other words, art of such a sort is more pleasing to them than any other. The habits of their teachers and fellows, combined with the natural love for bright hues, make them prefer pictures with just so much extra colouring as we ordinarily see. More than this would offend their critical and intellectual tastes, because they have learned from their predecessors to expect a close adherence to the probabilities of nature: less than this they would regard as sombre and gloomy, because they still demand decorative effect, under the names of warmth and harmony.

Indeed, the whole controversy of realism and idealism in art is to a great extent a difference of opinion as to the imitative or decorative intention of painting. The idealists are those who would to some extent subordinate the former to the latter. The realists are those who prefer the intellectual to the sensuous and emotional element. Of course other considerations also intervene; but on the whole, the idealist is the champion of combined sense-pleasure and accurate delineation, while the realist is the champion of pure imitative skill. The one is just as right as the other, because each knows what pleases himself; and in art, whose sole province is that of pleasing us, there cannot possibly be any other test of right than each man's individual taste.

The general conclusion at which we have arrived is therefore this. In our present art there is very little pure imitative work which is not more or less mixed up with decorative additions. For many ages these two styles of art have been differentiating; but they have not even now become absolutely distinct. Decoration still borrows the forms of flowers, foliage, and human features, though it conceals their lineaments by conventional treatment. Imitative art still employs colour for decorative purposes, though it endeavours to use it as closely as possible after the fashion of nature herself in her warmer moods. Both the artist and the public demand this union, though they will not always confess it; and they would not be satisfied with a rigorously realistic representation of

the exact colours found in the dullest natural scenes.

We insist upon

this particular amount of decorative intermixture and no other, because more colouring would shock our intellectual perception of similarity, while less would disappoint our expectation of sensuous stimulation.

Will the differentiation which has reached this point ever attain a higher stage? Will the imitative element ever be banished from ornament, and the decorative element from painting? This is a difficult and a prophetic question upon which a great deal may be said from either side.

On the one hand it may be urged that the progress in either direction has been steady and regular during a vast period of past development; and it may seem unlikely that so uniform a movement should cease just at its present point. Under our very eyes we see a considerable step in the same path being taken both by ornament and by painting. Pottery and textile fabrics are beginning to discard the bunches of flowers, the landscapes, the figure pieces of former industrial art. Decorators are preaching loudly that "good taste" demands of all products not absolutely imitative that they should be entirely decorative. In needlework, where nature cannot be represented with accuracy, the rulers of our artistic world are fast gravitating towards conventional patterns and artificial harmonies of tint: the shaded mosaic work of tiny square patches which used to cover so many yards of canvas is giving way to crewel-stitch and uniform colouring. In keramic art, the rich hues and beading of Renaissance pottery are displacing the floral ornamentation and landscape scenes of the last half-century. In house furniture, a distinguished knot of artistic designers have introduced wall-papers and cretonnes on which diapered patterns, exquisite twining tracery, and powerful yet delicately-blended colours are substituted for the scattered pictures which covered our walls and our sofas until yesterday. The public is beginning to draw a hard and fast line on this side between imitation and decoration, and to expect that wherever ornament is borrowed from natural forms it shall be so conventionalised and adapted as to show at once its decorative intention. Instead of real flowers and leaves in brilliant bunches on a white background, our æsthetic purveyors now tickle our eyes with continuous patterns of richly-toned foliage, blossom, and fruit, rendered in symmetrical order and graceful curves, on a ground of some relieving and restful neutral tint. In short, the present tendency of decorative art is to become more distinct than ever from imitative painting.*

Nor can I doubt that, on the whole, of late years, imitative art has

* Let me again warn the reader against the notion that any objective goodness or badness is asserted concerning this movement. It is a fashion which pleases me personally, and which, like many others, I am glad to follow; but it is none the less a fashion, not a principle or expression of objective truth. All art is good or bad relatively to the individual alone. To ask another man to conform to one's own standard of taste is in effect asking him to get himself a new nervous system.

simultaneously been growing less decorative and confining itself more strictly to the rigorous copying of nature. Individual instances there may be to the contrary; but most visitors to our exhibitions will probably agree that a more sober and immediately imitative style of colouring has been gradually growing both in the practice of painters and the estimation of connoisseurs. The movement towards differentiation is apparently affecting painting in the same way as it affects ornament, though doubtless to a less degree.

On the other hand, many plausible arguments may be brought against the probability of an ultimate and complete differentiation, at least within any reasonable forecast of future time. It may be said that while developed ornamental art has rejected, or is now rejecting, all direct imitation, it has always retained some likeness to animal and floral forms, however much disguised by conventional adaptations. There does not seem to be any reason why it should not continue in future to base itself upon these natural shapes, even if it take hitherto unexampled pains in asserting their purely suggestive character. So too, in the case of painting, it may be reasonably affirmed that the sensuous love for brilliant colour is a more primordial and deeply-seated element of our æsthetic nature than the intellectual love for accurate imitation. It may easily happen, therefore, that even when the pleasure of direct chromatic stimulation has been minimised in imitative art, there will still remain a remnant to bear witness for ever to its originally decorative nature. It seems hard to believe that painters will ever cease from choosing for their themes the most exceptionally brilliant scenes of the external world. It would appear natural enough to suppose that we should always most represent what pleases us most in its presentative form.

Perhaps an intermediate course will be the one actually taken in the future development of art. A more exacting and critical eye in coming generations may demand a stricter adherence to the colouring of nature in landscape and portrait, while it may retain somewhat of the older brilliancy in purely ideal pieces. There is little likelihood of any ascetic rejection of colour on its own account. But when the rising æsthetic school have reformed our houses in accordance with their own taste, it may perhaps happen that the public will find colour enough in its decorative appliances, and only demand the intellectual pleasure of accurate imitation in its pictorial art. There will perhaps be sensuous stimulation sufficient for every eye in the encaustic tiles, the wooden parquets, the oaken wainscoting, the rich carpets, the deeply-tinted dados, the light and brilliant wall-papers, the delicate table-covers, the chintzes, curtains, cushions, banner-screens, and antimacassars; and it may become a pleasant relief to rest the vision and fix the attention upon a landscape or a figure-painting in gentle and natural colours. Pictures might then cease to do double duty as art-products and decorative furniture. Landscape might become greyer and more truthful; historical paintings might

grow less theatrical and more realistic; while general figure subjects might be chosen with less reference to costume and colouring than is at present the case.

However this may be, it is important to remember that art in every stage is exactly adapted to its public and its professors. The stage which we have actually reached is at each moment the one which we are best able to appreciate. In art, whatever is is right; because to be right is merely to please one's public. I trust, therefore, that no reader will misunderstand my meaning and suppose that I would blame artists for the decorative colouring which I cannot help seeing in their work. I merely point out that it is there, and why it is there. Further than this no philosophic critic can go. To say that it is right or wrong is merely to say that the critic himself admires or dislikes it; a purely personal point which can very seldom be of any general interest to the outside world. Given an object and its representation, any man can decide upon the positive question whether or not, and how much, the copy reproduces the original. But no man can decide dogmatically just how much resemblance and how much decorative deviation other people ought to admire. It is the business of the critic to point out beauties or failures as he conceives them: it is the province of the psychological æsthetician to account for the average likes and dislikes of others as he finds them. G. A.

THE RESULT OF PERCIVAL'S ECONOMY.

UDITH'S letter lay on the table still. Bertie had not come to claim it, and she had not come home.

Having ascertained these facts, Percival went to his own room, and finding his tea set ready for him, he ate and drank hurriedly, hesitating whether he should go and meet her. Standing by the window, he looked out on the darkening street. All vulgarity of detail was lost in the softening dusk, and there was something almost picturesque in the opposite roof, whose outline was delicately drawn on the pale blue sky. Everything was refined, subdued, and shadowy in the tender light; but Percival, gazing, saw no charm in the little twilight picture. Sorrow may be soothed by quiet loveliness, but perplexities absorb all our faculties, and we do not heed the beauty of the world, which is simple and unperplexed. If it is forced upon our notice, the contrast irritates us; it is almost an impertinence. Percival would have been angry had he been called upon to feel the poetry which Bertie had found, only a few days before, in the bit of houseleek growing on that arid waste of tiles. It is true that, in that dim light, the houseleek was only a dusky little knob.

Should he go and meet Judith? Should he wait for her? What would she do? Should he go to St. Sylvester's? By the time he could reach the Church the choristers would have assembled-would the organist be there? While he doubted what to do, his fingers were in his waistcoat pocket, and he incidentally discovered that he had only a shilling and a threepenny piece in it. He went quickly to the table and struck a light. Since he had enrolled himself as Judith Lisle's true