arments or crockery or books, of costly and delicately polished wood,
but shaped like a packing-case, and displaying with marvellous
impartiality two exquisitely cast and chased doorguard plates of
far-fetched, many-tinted alloys of silver, and--a set of hinges, a
lock and a key, such as the village ironmonger supplies in blue paper
parcels of a dozen. A mere coincidence, an accident, you may object;
an unlucky oversight which cannot be fairly alleged against the art of
our times. Pardon me: there may be coincidences and accidents in other
matters, but there are none in art; because the essence of art is to
sacrifice even the finest irrelevancies, to subordinate the most
refractory details, to subdue coincidence and accident into seeming
purpose and harmony. And whatever our practical activity, in its
identification of time and money, may allow itself in the way of
"scamping" and of "shoddy"--art can never plead an oversight, because
art, in so far as it _is_ art, represents those organic and organised
preferences in the domain of form, those imperative and stringent
demands for harmony, which see everything, feel everything, and know
no law or motive save their own complete satisfaction.

Art for art's sake! We see it nowhere revealed so clearly as in the
Exhibition, where it masks as "Decorative Art." Art answering no claim
of practical life and obeying no law of contemplative preference, art
without root, without organism, without logical reason or moral
decorum, art for mere buying and selling, art which expresses only
self-assertion on the part of the seller, and self-satisfaction on the
part of the buyer. A walk through this Exhibition is an object-lesson
in a great many things besides aesthetics; it forces one to ask a good
many of Tolstoi's angriest questions; but it enables one also, if duly
familiar with the art of past times, to answer them in a manner
different from Tolstoi's.

One carries away the fact, which implies so many others, that not one
of these objects is otherwise than expensive; expensive, necessarily
and intentionally, from the rarity both of the kind of skill and of
the kind of material; these things are reserved by their price as well
as their uselessness, for a small number of idle persons. They have no
connection with life, either by penetrating, by serviceableness, deep
into that of the individual; or by spreading, by cheapness, over a
wide surface of the life of the nations.

XIV.