UNDER the bitter regime of Revolutionary times luxury was not only gracefully abnegated for a little while - it was forgotten. They changed all that. There was to be no more affectation, no more stilted refinement, no more jesting beneath mock decorum. Nobody was better than anybody else, and they should not have more; everything was forced into a severe, uncompromising mould. Stiff-backed reformers said they did not want easy chairs, so they took them away from those who did. They said love of dress was wicked, rich silks nonsense, people did not have them in old Greece; so they burnt them for the gold in them, and let delicate women die of cancer and bronchitis in high-waisted muslin which could not keep them warm. They forgot, no doubt, sometimes that Athens was old Greece as much as Sparta, and in their vigorous sweeping away of all that they considered needless and bad, they swept away much that was very good. This is the unavoidable result of every violent reaction, and many innocent often suffer for one guilty. What is chiefly curious in the history of English and French art is that, however eccentric the fashion, however extreme the recoil from that to the next, all is done in the name of the classics.

When we walked about under a mountain of padding and buckram, and built our black secretaires like temples and our beds like monuments, we copied the classics; when we threw away whalebone and weight for the graceful laisser aller of Charles II. s time, with short waists and flowing robes, and began to mix Chinese panels and Italian marqueterie with our old oak, it was still the classics we were following. When luxury seemed frantic with rainbow colours and curves of endless vegetation, we had a classic reason for it; and when we suddenly sat down in a chemise on the hardest of chairs and went in sedulously for the barest, stiffest, coldest of forms in dress and furniture, still we said it was a return to the classic, and this unhappy word has to bear the burden of all our follies.

It is constantly forgotten by persons who praise the furniture and costume of the Empire period, that beauty, refinement, grace, are terms wholly opposed to the spirit of that terrific reaction. The changes which we refer to Louis XVI.'s reign but for which Mme. de Pompadour is primarily responsible, being greatly harassed by dreams of the 'antique,' were indeed a refinement upon forms whose redundance was becoming foolish and vulgar; but the later reformation in art which came after France had turned at bay, was by no means in the direction of beauty, but of truth, straightforwardness, plainness, equality. Have done with your elegances, your jests, your love-making, your corruption, your phantasmagoria, the nation seemed to say: strip off all these superfluities, look us in the face, and be simple, like Socrates; and if you are not simple you shall die.1 Then how fervently people tried to be simple, and to hate refinement, and wealth, and the noblesse - it was important enough in France; and England, sobered across the water by a lesson which might have been applied nearer home, cried out that life was earnest and the lust of the eye impertinent, as the Puritans had done.

Like them she flung away all she had that was merely pretty and pleasant, and fancied that self-castigation was in itself virtue.

It was a stern, startled, palpitating mood as of people standing before the tribunal of death; if the works done under such pressure were beautiful it was by accident; they only strove to express outwardly this vehement alteration in feeling by copying in detail a social state which seemed to them strong, simple, grand, rude, and trusted that the outward life would react back again upon the inward and raise up a new generation with old Greek virtues. Of course the whole thing was wrong, half-sane, like a drunken man suddenly sobered by a shock whom the shock itself may unbalance.