that is the mainspring of his elevated and decorative art.  Open at random the catalogue full of quotations from the painter’s pen and you encounter such titles as Leda and the Swan, treated with poetic restraint; Jupiter and Semele, Tyrtaeus Singing During the Combat, St. Elizabeth and the Miracle of the Roses, Lucretia and Tarquin, Pasiphae, the Triumph of Alexander, Salome, Dante and Virgil, Bathsheba, Jason and the Golden Fleece.  All literatures were ransacked for themes.  This painter suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal.  When a subject coincided with his technical expression the result approximates perfection.  Consider the Salome, so marvellously paraphrased in prose by Huysmans.  The aquarelle in the Luxembourg is more plastic, more jewelled than the oil; Moreau often failed in the working-out of his ideas.  Yet, never in art has a hallucination been thus set before us with such uncompromising reality.  The sombre, luxurious decor, the voluptuous silhouette of the dancing girl, the hieratic pose of the Tetrarch, even the aureoled head of John, are forgotten in the contemplation of Salome, who is become cataleptic at sight of the apparition.  Arrested her attitude her flesh crisps with fear.  Her face is contracted into a mask of death.  The lascivious dance seems suspended in midair.  To have painted so impossible a picture bears witness to the extraordinary quality of Moreau’s complex art.  Nor is the Salome his masterpiece.  In the realm of the decorator he must be placed high.  His genius is Byzantine.  Jupiter and Semele, with its colossal and acrian architectures, its gigantic figure of the god, from whose august head emanate spokes of light, is Byzantine of a wild luxuriousness in pattern and fancy.  Moreau excels in representing cataracts of nude women, ivory-toned of flesh, exquisite in proportion, set off by radiant jewels and wonder-breeding brocades.  His skies are in violent ignition, or else as soft as Lydian airs.  What could be more grandiose than the Triumph of Alexander (No. 70 in the catalogue)?  Not John Martin or Piranesi excelled the Frenchman in bizarre architectural backgrounds.  And the Chimeras, what a Baudelairian imagination!  Baudelaire of the bitter heart!  All luxury, all sin, all that is the shame and the glory of mankind is here, as in a tapestry dulled by the smoke of dreams; but as in his most sanguinary combats not a sound, not a motion comes from this canvas.  When the slaves, lovely females, are thrown to the fish to fatten them for some Roman patrician’s banquet, we admire the beauty of colour, the clear static style, the solidity of the architecture, but we are unmoved.  If there is such a thing as disinterested art it is the claustral art of Moreau—­which can be both perverse and majestic.