Their originality is arrived at
rather through exclusion than discovery. They simply drop pedantry and
exult in irresponsibility. They are hardly even a school.
Yet they have, one and all, in greater or less degree, that distinct
quality of charm which is eternally incompatible with routine. They are
as little constructive as the age itself, as anything that we mean when
we use the epithet Louis Quinze. Of everything thus indicated one
predicates at once unconsciousness, the momentum of antecedent thought
modified by the ease born of habit; the carelessness due to having one's
thinking done for one and the license of proceeding fancifully,
whimsically, even freakishly, once the lines and limits of one's action
have been settled by more laborious, more conscientious philosophy than
in such circumstances one feels disposed to frame for one's self. There
is no break with the Louis Quatorze things, not a symptom of revolt;
only, after them the deluge! But out of this very condition of things,
and out of this attitude of mind, arises a new art, or rather a new
phase of art, essentially classic, as I said, but nevertheless imbued
with a character of its own, and this character distinctly charming.
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