interesting than others, and consequently
produce better art, just as certain seasons produce better crops. We heard
in the Nouvelle Athenes how the Democratic movement, in other words,
Respectability, in other words, Education, has extinguished the
handicrafts; it was admitted that in the more individual arts--painting and
poetry--men would be always found to sacrifice their lives for a picture or
a poem: but no man is, after all, so immeasurably superior to the age he
lives in as to be able to resist it wholly; he must draw sustenance from
some quarter, and the contemplation of the past will not suffice. Then the
pressure on him from without is as water upon the diver; and sooner or
later he grows fatigued and comes to the surface to breathe; he is as a
flying-fish pursued by sharks below and cruel birds above; and he neither
dives as deeply nor flies as high as his freer and stronger ancestry. A
daring spirit in the nineteenth century would have been but a timid nursery
soul indeed in the sixteenth. We want tumult and war to give us
forgetfulness, sublime moments of peace to enjoy a kiss in; but we are
expected to be home to dinner at seven, and to say and do nothing that
might shock the neighbours. Respectability has wound itself about society,
a sort of octopus, and nowhere are you quite free from one of its horrible
suckers. The power of the villa residence is supreme: art, science,
politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa
goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art
of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny
reality of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the
meanness of a Frith--not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading
naturalism of a coloured photograph. To my mind there is no sadder
spectacle of artistic debauchery than a London theatre; the overfed
inhabitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to
assist them through their hesitating digestions; an ignorant mob in the pit
and gallery forgetting the miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of
the sentimentality of the back stairs. Were other ages as coarse and as
common as ours? It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not
more intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Impossible
that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in
such sinks of literary infamies as _I