created fixed by a touch of the master's magic--lightly frozen over by
an enchanting frost. Only ice is cold. At any rate, what happens to
the spectator is that first he perceives a tangle of rather hot and
apparently inharmonious tones; gradually he becomes aware of a subtle,
astonishing, and unlooked-for harmony; finally, from this harmony emerge
completely realized and exquisitely related forms. After which, if he
has any sense of art, he remains spellbound and uncritical, and ceases
to bother about how the thing was done. That, at least, is my impression
of Renoir's latest style. Examples of it abound in Paris, notably M.
Maurice Gangnat's collection; and it is said that the artist intends
these pictures to improve by keeping.

In his pleasant, well-written introduction M. Albert André gives a
portrait of Renoir that is almost too good to be true: we are encouraged
to believe just what we should like to believe. It is incredibly
sympathetic. Yet it is very much what we might have guessed from the
pictures had we dared. And, indeed, we did dare--some of us; for,
besides its purely æsthetic character, its French taste and tact, the
art of Renoir has over-tones to which the literary and historical
intelligence cannot choose but listen. An intimate eulogy of France by
a most lovable Frenchman is what, in our lazy moods, we allow these
pictures to give us. They do it charmingly. For instance, though I never
saw a Renoir that could justify a district visitor in showing more of
her teeth than nature had already discovered, here, unmistakably, are
Parisians enjoying themselves in their own Parisian way. Here is the
France of the young man's fancy and the old man's envious dreams. Here,
if you please, you may smell again that friture that ate so well, one
Sunday at Argenteuil, twenty years ago, in the company of a young poet
who must have had genius and two models who were certainly divine. And
that group with the fat, young mother suckling her baby--there is all