r the
arcade of the _Rue de Rivoli_ and along the _Quais_, in the cool of the
May morning, to the new _Salon_ which was then in the _Champ-de-Mars_.
And one morning at the _Salon_ made it clear to me, as years at the
Academy could not, why French criticism permits itself to speak of art
as a "game" and of the artist's work as "amusing" and "gay." There were
words that got into my article as persistently as the lilacs and the
horse-chestnuts.

II

If we brought to Paris a talent for talk and youth for enjoyment, Paris
at the moment was providing liberally more than we could talk about or
had time to enjoy. London may have been wide awake--for London--in the
Nineties, but it was half asleep compared to Paris and would not have
been awake at all if it had not gone to Paris for the "new" it
bragged of so loud in art and every excitement it cultivated, and for
the "_fin-de-siecle,_" that chance phrase passed lightly from mouth to
mouth in Paris of which it made a serious classification.

[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
IN THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES]

I have watched with sympathetic amusement these late years one new
movement, one new revolt after another, started and led by little men
who have not the strength to move anything or the independence to revolt
against anything, except in their boast of it, and who would be
frightened by the bigness of a movement and revolt like the Secession
from the old _Salon_ that followed the International Exposition of 1889.
I feel how long ago the Nineties were when I hear the young people in
Paris to-day talk of the two _Salons_ as the _Artistes-Francais_ and the
_Beaux-Arts_. In the Nineties we, who watched the parting of the ways,
knew them only as the Old _Salon_ and the New _Salon_ because that is
what we saw in them and what they really were--unless we distinguished
them as the _Champ-de-Mars Salon_ and the _Champs-Elysees Salon_, for
another ten years were to pass before there was a _Grand Palais_ for
both to move into. We could not write about either without a reminder of
the age of the one and the youth of the other, the Old _Salon_
remaining the home of the tradition that has become hide-bound
convention, and the new _Salon_ offering headquarters to the tradition
that is being "carried on," as we were forever pointing out, borrowing
the phrase from Whistler. We were given in the Nineties to borrowing the
things Whistler said and wrote, for we knew, if it is not every crit