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not be denied that the greatest of English aptitudes is for literature. The wide appreciation of it in England is unmatched by a like appreciation of any other form of art. The growth of English novel-writing and its healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of Greek sculpture, or of architecture in the Ile de France. An Englishman of to-day who thinks painters can be spun out of theories would surely laugh with instinctive knowledge of the veritable requirements of their art if one were to propose supplying novelists or poets in a similar way. If we thus acknowledge that two kinds of art--and those two requiring the greatest amount of imaginative power--can flourish with spontaneity even in so self-conscious a civilization as ours, we shall fail to see in that civilization a sufficient _a priori_ reason why the same might not have been the case with painting. If, however, still keeping to our own day, we look for the reverse of this picture, we shall find some approach to it in the condition of the painter's art in England. Here theory runs wild, practice falls far behind, and a great part of the practice that exists is inspired and regulated by theory. Artists are especially self-conscious, and the public, while much concerned with things artistic and fed on daily food of art-theory and speculation, is specially devoid of an innate artistic sense and an educated faculty for appreciating technical perfection. In England, more even than on the Continent or with ourselves, is there a passion for story-telling with the brush, a desire to give ideas instead of pictures, a denial of the fact that the main object of a picture is to please the eye just as truly and as surely as the main object of a symphony is to please the ear. If we look through the catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition, we notice the preponderance of scenes illustrative of English or other literature--of canvases that tell a story or point a moral or bear a punning or a sentimental title. And we notice the great number of quotations introduced into the catalogue without any actual explanatory
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