sh art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out
eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the
original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest
contortions of affected mediaevalism, rarely striking out a note of
common sense. Simple English art is the apotheosis of the British
middle-class spirit, of Mr. Arnold's "Philistinism." English art
departing from this spirit shows, not Mr. Arnold's "sweetness and
light," not calmness, repose, sureness of self, unconsciousness of its
own springs of life, but theories running into vague contradictions, a
far-fetched abnormalness, a morbid conception of beauty, a defiant
disregard of the fact that a public exists which judges by common sense
and the eye, not by a fine-spun confusion of theories and an undefined
but omnipotent and deified "aesthetic sense" non-resident in the optic
nerve. Mr. Whistler's pictures to-day, cleverly as he can paint if he
will, are not pictures--I do not mean in fact, which is certainly
true--but in title. They are "Natures in Black and Gold," or "In Blue
and Silver," or "In Blue and Gold," or "Arrangements in Black," or
"Harmonies in Amber and Brown." Here we have the desperate reaction from
the idea that _l'anecdote_ is everything to the idea that it is
sufficient to represent nothing (poetically conceived!) with little
color and less form, with the vaguest and slightest and most untechnical
technique. It is hard to say which would most puzzle Titian
redivivus--"Little cold tooties," or a blue-gray wash with a point or
two of yellow, bearing some imaginary resemblance to the Thames with its
gaslights, and called a "Nocturne in Blue and Gold."

The French "impressionalist" clique, similar in spirit to these
Englishmen, though less outre in practice, is not by any means of so
great importance in France as they are in England. It has more than once
been remarked in England that the old-fashioned amateur--patron and
critic, _kenner_--is dying out, and that his modern substitute must not
only choose, but experiment--not only admire, but be admired. This
spirit, spreading through a nation, will not make it a nation of
artists, but will make the nation's artists amateurs. No critic, no
amateur, is more loath to try his own hand than the one who most deeply
and rightly appreciates the skill of others, and the rare and God-given
and difficult nature of that skill. The confusion of amateur with
professional work