which belongs to all expert craftsmanship. It has a flexibility, what musicians call a sense of touch, which stamps it at once. The excellence here displayed is not of that kind. It is a forced excellence; an excellence not exerting itself freely, but constrained, whether it will or no, to celebrate the supremacy of luxury. Rarely, save among Orientals, do we find the toil of the workman lavished in a spirit so patiently servile.

This luxury, then, so universal and so dominant, is the obvious characteristic which we are to question more closely. There is a good deal of luxurious furniture made in all ages, and perhaps at the first glance, it might puzzle us to say what is the difference between this universal, luxurious furniture scattered through the ages, and the luxurious furniture of Hertford House. There is, however, if we consider the matter, this difference: that with luxurious furniture in general the luxury is an attribute dependent on the use of the thing. It is an adornment and decoration of something real, an accessory or afterthought, which, though often carried far, still keeps its decorative purpose and does not thrust itself forward as the aim and object for which the thing was made.

The peculiarity, on the contrary, of the Hertford House luxury is that it is an exposition and analysis of the quality of luxury as a governing motive. Ostentation and show are not here accessory to use and comfort. They are the primary conditions. If we question any bit of this furniture we shall find this divorce from reality admitted, and this purpose of display confessed. The primary use of chairs and sofas is, after all, to sit or lie upon, and in most luxurious furniture this use is fully admitted, and the luxury consists in elaborating and perfecting the use, and, by adding the easiest springs and softest cushions, making the chair or

sofa still more lie-able or sit-able on. But the Hertford House chairs and sofas are made for no such purpose. The adornment lavished on them, far from emphasizing their natural use, has actually annulled that use, so that they are now far less lie-able or sit-able on than any cottage bench or stool of common wood. Sight-seeing is tiring work, but we do not imagine that any visitor, however tired, has ever felt the temptation to sit and rest on one of these stiff and gilded seats.

The reader is familiar, probably, with an architectural theory which asserts that ornament must conform to structural use. This theory, which applies to a good deal besides architecture, seems to be, in the case of French eighteenth-century craftsmanship, re

versed.

None of it suggests use at all. We have said that the chairs and sofas do not invite us to sit on them. But neither do the inlaid glittering tables with their golden legs offer to supply the ordinary use of tables. How could we venture to hide such splendor under a litter of newspapers and novels? In the same way the escritoires are not made to be written at, and the cabinets are not made for putting things away in. Nothing, in short, that we look at, makes it any longer its object and purpose in life to fulfil those functions for which originally, as a species, it was called into existence. Everything has passed beyond that stage, and, by common consent, has substituted a decorative for a useful purpose. Functional use has retired into the background. Show and display have asserted themselves as the raison d'être and serious business of life. With immense pains and patient care, each article and object, in all these gorgeous suites of apartments,, sets out to be primarily an ornament; divests itself of reality, puts away the practical purposes of life and gives itself up to an exclusively decorative treatment.

This is, as it seems to us, the note of the style before us. If, as we stroll from room to room, we take with us the formula "a decorative rather than a useful purpose" and apply it to each object in turn, we shall find that each will bow to the justice of the definition. Style, as we said, marks the presence of a definite meaning or message, and here we have the meaning of these French styles; a meaning scarcely to be questioned by any one who in such a place as Hertford House submits himself to the cumulative influence of his surroundings. Let us, that we may the better realize it, note its moment of origin. Louis Quatorze furniture, like Louis Quinze, is luxurious and splendid, with its brocades and tapestries and rich Boulle inlays. But it is splendid in a stately, dignified fashion. It harmonizes well with the ordered long arcades and the great ceremonious suites of salons of the architecture of the period. Moreover, when we come to consider it, it has by no means yet lost touch with the uses and realities of life. A study of the furniture collection in the South Kensington galleries will show that, as regards shape and form, a good deal of the simplicity and massiveness of the old Gothic furniture survives even to the eighteenth century. Through the Renaissance period this massiveness is retained, though the tendency to redundancy of carving is apparent. Down to the latter half of the sixteenth century the sculpture is for the most part out of the solid wood, and the pieces, in material and shape, are simple and strong in construction, though treated pompously. Later we come to inlaid marquetries, but still the substantial forms survive. The decoration, however overdone, does not usurp the place of function and become the ruling purpose. And this is the case even during the gorgeous Louis Quatorze period. M. Havard selects the word "majestic" as descriptive of

the art as well as the life of that period, or at least of the first half of it, and, admitting a trifle of vulgarity in the majesty, it is a well-applied epithet. The fact is Louis Quatorze splendor still cloaks something real. Affairs of state still count for something. The pride and power of the nation are still important considerations. Louis never allows any one to forget that he is a great king. This sense of dignity and stateliness runs all through the splendor of this reign, as it runs all through its life and politics, and makes one constantly aware that it is a splendor compatible with a certain large effectiveness of character and aim.

With the passing of the Grand Monarque, however, this majesty passes too. "Avec le dernier soupir du plus majestueux des rois, la majesté, déjà quelque peu méconnue, achève de s'envoler de la terre." A new spirit that knew nothing of the duties and responsibilities of life takes its place. "En quelques instants tout change; le vieux décor s'effondre et sur ses ruines un monde nouveau, frais, pimpant, gracieux, léger, indiscret et joyeux, s'établit et s'installe." Seriousness in life and art goes out with Louis Quatorze; frivolity comes into life and art with Louis Quinze. The old strength and stateliness give place to an artificial and excessive refinement in workmanship, not of detail only but of form. What was ornament in the older style assumes control, eats form away, until form itself becomes ornament. It is the peculiarity of the studies of curves and scroll work of Louis Quinze furniture; and the slender, attenuated proportions of Louis Seize, that they no longer represent the beautifying and perfecting of the common things of life, which after all is the true function of art as applied to things like furniture, but minister and bear witness to a life cut off from such things. It is impossible to associate these exquisite cre

The

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ations with the idea of every day life and common use at all. They have forgotten all about use and reality and have made of mere luxury their raison d'être and supreme justification. artificial has to them become the real. To this we return as the keynote of these later styles, and it is in this that they portray so effectively the life of the class and period to which they belong. For it is not mere luxury which is found in the French Court of the eighteenth century. Luxury has generally been a habitant of courts. is the fact that luxury has assumed control of life, that it has eaten into society's core, eaten realities and duties quite away, and become itself the only serious preoccupation of life, which stamps it, in the French society of the time, with such peculiar significance. The remarkable thing about this French society is that it is incapable of any useful function whatever. The courtiers and nobles of Louis XV's reign seem to have lost all power of taking an interest in anything save court scandals and intrigues. Those among them whose memory goes back to the manners of an earlier age, an age not destitute of courage, dignity and fortitude, deplore the falling off in virile virtue. They can scarcely credit the change which has taken place under their very eyes. There is no principle, not honor itself even, which has not succumbed to the corroding effects of frivolity. The nation is visibly drifting to destruction, the signs of an approaching catastrophe grow daily more threatening, yet society jests and titters on, incapable of realizing anything save its own dissipa tions and its own elaborate etiquette.

Let us examine this a little more closely. Let us take the formula we applied to the furniture-a decorative rather than a useful purpose and see how it answers as applied to society. And in applying this formula to society let us note this: that it is not the dissi

pation and luxury themselves which are significant, but the fact that the dissipation and luxury have usurped the place of reality and become the one serious business of life. The significant symptoms, accordingly, will be those which show us this reality passing out of the serious and important things of life. Such facts as that the Prince de Conti used the dust of a crushed diamond to dry the ink of a billet to his mistress, or that the Queen gave the Dauphin a carriage covered with rubies and sapphires, or that Madame de Matignon paid 24,000 livres a year to have her hair brushed, or that the Comte d'Artois pulled down and rebuilt a castle to prepare a fête for the Queen, or that young de Chenonceaux lost seven hundred thousand livres in one night's gambling, or that another courtier kept forty horses for an occasional ride in the Bois de Boulogne, and another bought up and emptied the streets leading to his residence that his amours might be conducted in secret, or that Madame du Barry's bills during the time she was in favor amounted to some four million livres; such facts as these-and they might be multiplied to fill volumes-are not, after all, the kind of facts that best serve to show the character of the luxury of the age. They can be matched, more or less closely, in the histories of most aristocracies in most ages. The facts which are significant are those which testify to the insensibility of this pleasure-loving class to natural instincts and primitive duties and responsibilities; which testify, that is to say, to the ebbing of reality out of the serious things of life. When, for instance, a Comte de Tilly records that he was brought up by valets, or a Duc de Biron, observing that a lackey had the superintendence of his education, remarks, “j'étais d'ailleurs comme tous les enfans de mon âge et de ma sorte, les plus jolis habits pour sortir, nu et mourant de faim à la

maison," then we begin to realize what was being deducted from the serious things of life to pay for the frivolities. It is curious to notice that the value of children in this society was essentially a decorative one. To be trained in the etiquette of their elders, to be dressed in the mode, the little boys in ruffles and swords, the little girls in rouge and patches with false hair piled on their heads, and have their precocious gallantry and savoir-faire paraded to the laughter and applause of society, were the uses they were put to. Their infantine compliments and bons mots are recited with enthusiasm, and they are allowed to constitute a charming addition to the lapdog and negro page of their mother's suite.

In the same way, when, in turning over the memoirs of the day, we find ourselves arrested by phrase after phrase and episode after episode which record how entirely the whole meaning of marriage and married life has been swamped in a sea of intrigues and petty liaisons, the same sense of the sapping of the serious things of life is brought home to us. One almost hesitates to intrude moral considerations into the presence of anything so irresponsibly gay as the society of the French Court, for indeed there is something disarming and next door to innocent in the excesses of people who are quite unaffectedly and honestly blind to the serious side of things. At the same time, nothing can alter the fact that fathers and mothers and children and husbands and wives are among life's chief realities, and, by a normally healthy society, must be so treated. The truth, of course, is that where great store is set on trifling things and the pursuit of them followed up with intense seriousness, this seriousness has to be paid for in the loss of a corresponding amount of interest in what is real and important. It is this loss of interest in what is real and im

portant which is the really deadly symptom of the French Court life of the period. The supreme importance attached to gaiety and dissipation and show has so sucked the strength out of all real and important functions that at last the sense for reality has become a lost sense. Children are not realities; wives and husbands are not realities; victories and defeats, as we shall see in a minute, and shame and dishonor are not realities. Nothing can exist, nothing can occur, but it is turned immediately into food for jests. defeat of Hochstadt is deplored because the skit on it lacks humor. Rosbach is approved because its verses are excellent. Necker's attempts as Minister of Finance to stave off national bankruptcy count for nothing. His fitness for his office is proved by a particularly splendid banquet given to the fashionable world of Paris. Every event, however tragic, every crisis, however grave, is dealt with as comedy. In proportion as the unreal has become real, the real has become unreal.

The

But this instinct for unreality, which we come to recognize in the court party as quite unfailing, reveals itself in much more important than merely social matters. It reveals itself with just as much infallibility in matters of state policy and national government. It is important to remember in this connection that French society and the French government were, in spirit, one. Richelieu's policy, bequeathed by him to Louis Quatorze, of wrecking feudalism once and for all by depriving the great territorial nobles of their civil duties and responsibilities, was fated to have as grave an effect on the King's authority as on that of the nobles themselves. Shorn of all useful purpose, their authority and functions in their own departments usurped by crown officials, the aristocrats left their huge châteaux and estates and gravitated to Versailles. If they could not be useful

let them be ornamental. It had been decreed that the State should be nothing to them, they proceeded to make society everything. Hence was developed that purely decorative purpose which became the distinguishing note of this French society. But that purpose did not stop at society. It proceeded to corrupt the governing principle itself. Imbedded, so to speak, in the heart of this society, breathing its air, living its life, receiving its influence, cut off by it from the outer world, the monarchy became rapidly infected with its spirit. It had created a frivolous class and itself caught the disease. The government which ensued, a government of mistresses and the favorites of mistresses, was animated purely by the prevailing social frivolity. Henceforth monarchy and aristocracy advance to their doom hand in hand.

We shall not be wandering from our subject if without plunging too deeply into history we dwell just enough on one or two stages of this progress to bring out the special characteristic we have in view. Several of the chief factors which were leading up to the Revolution had their origin in the middle years of the eighteenth century, and of these the two chief, perhaps, were the war of the Austrian Alliance and the philosophic movement in literature. It is interesting to observe how thoroughly in their own manner was the handling by the Court party of these significant events.

During these middle years of the eighteenth century two distinct and opposed lines of policy were offered to France to choose between. One was a policy of concentration; an internal, exclusively European policy, leading to no national development and addressing itself merely to the adjustment of European rivalries. The other was a policy of expansion, consisting in the recognition of the larger opportunities which the newly realized East and West were

beginning to unfold to human enterprise. In this latter policy lay, of course, France's true line of progress. Her position, both in India and America, was strong. In America she laid claim to the whole basin of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and was prepared to back her claims. In 1754 Washington's expedition was forced to capitulate, and in the following year Braddock's much more important force was practically annihilated. The English Company of the Ohio was quashed, and English attempts at expansion everywhere checked and foiled. French forts and blockhouses rose on every eminence and commanded every valley. It was France's avowed object to drive the English east of the Alleghany Mountains, and she was in a fair way by 1755 to accomplish it. Similarly in India the boldness of Dupleix's schemes of French conquest and dominion seemed justified by circumstances. In the rivalry between French Pondichery and British Madras the French settlement had the best of it. Madras fell in 1746. In 1748 the combined land and sea expeditions under Major Lawrence and Admiral Boscawen against Pondichery were repulsed. It is noticeable that in these colonial wars the French leaders were usually men of remarkable energy and dash, prompt to act and ready to accept full responsibility for their actions. Such were La Gallisonière, Du Quesne and La Corne in America, and Dupleix, La Bourdonnais, and Lally in India. They were well supported, and the vigor with which France's interests were served in these enterprises is in strong contrast to the nerveless and feeble character of her operations in Europe. The truth is that it was in the opportunities for national expansion promised by India that the hopes of French development lay, and so long as she showed a disposition to avail herself of these opportunities France drew to her service all the keen