s short. It might
be Impressionism, Sisley still showing if Monet did not, and Vibrism and
Pointillism and all the other _isms_ springing up and out of it. It
might be Rosicrucianism and Symbolism which had just come in, and Sar
Peladan--does anybody to-day read the Sar's long tedious books, bought
by us with such zeal and promptly left to grow dusty on our
shelves?--and Huysmans and their fellow teachers of Magic and members of
the _Rose-Croix_ were being interpreted in paint and in black-and-white,
and if the interpretations did not interpret to so prosaic a mind as
mine, it mattered the less because they were often excuse for a fine
design. And the square brush mark lingered, and much was heard of the
broken brush mark, and values had not ceased to be absorbing, nor _la
peinture au premier coup_ and _la peinture en plein air_ to be wrangled
over. And a religious wave from nobody knew where swept artists to the
Scriptures for motives and sent them for a background, not with Holman
Hunt to Palestine, but to their own surroundings, their own country, to
the light and atmosphere each knew best--Lhermitte's Christ suffered
little children to come unto Him in a French peasant's cottage;
Edelfelt's Christ walked in the sunlight of the North; Jean Beraud's
Christ found Simon the Pharisee at home in a Parisian club; and no
landscape, realistic, impressionistic, decorative, was complete unless a
familiar figure or group came straying into it from out the Bible. Much
that was done perished with the group or the fad that gave it birth,
much when suddenly come upon now on the walls of the provincial gallery
looks disconcertingly old-fashioned. But nevertheless, the movement, the
energy, the life of the Nineties was a healthy enemy to that stagnation
which is a death trap for art.

And Black-and-White was a section to be visited in the freshness of the
morning, not to be put off, like the dull, shockingly over-crowded
little room at the Academy, to the last hurried moments of fatigue--a
section to devote the day to and then to leave only for the bookstall or
bookshop where we could invest the money we had not to spare in the
books and magazines and papers illustrated by Carlos Schwabe and Khnopf
and Steinlen and Willette and Caran D'Ache and Louis Legrand and Forain
and the men whose work in the original we had been studying and laying
down the law about for hours. And the artist's new invention, his new
experiment, came as surely