mantic is duly registered
by a change of subject. Ruins and mediaeval history come into fashion.
For art, which is as little concerned with the elegant bubbles of the
eighteenth century as with the foaming superabundance of the Romantic
revival, this change is nothing more than the swing of an irrelevant
pendulum. But the new ideas led inevitably to antiquarianism, and
antiquarians found something extraordinarily congenial in what was
worst in Gothic art. Obedient limners follow the wiseacres. What else is
there for them to follow? Stragglers from the age of reason are set down
to trick out simpering angels. No longer permitted to stand on the laws
of propriety or their personal dignity, they are ordered to sweeten
their cold meats with as much amorous and religious sentiment as they
can exude. Meanwhile the new fellows, far less sincere than the old, who
felt nothing and said so, begin to give themselves the airs of artists.
These Victorians are intolerable: for now that they have lost the old
craft and the old tradition of taste, the pictures that they make are no
longer pleasantly insignificant; they bellow "stinking mackerel."

About the middle of the nineteenth century art was as nearly dead as art
can be. The road ran drearily through the sea-level swamps. There were,
of course, men who felt that imitation, whether of nature or of
another's work, was not enough, who felt the outrage of calling the
staple products of the "forties" and "fifties" art; but generally they
lacked the power to make an effective protest. Art cannot die out
utterly; but it lay sick in caves and cellars. There were always one or
two who had a right to call themselves artists: the great Ingres[21]
overlaps Crome; Corot and Daumier overlap Ingres; and then come the
Impressionists. But the mass of painting and sculpture had sunk to
something that no intelligent and cultivated person would dream of
calling art. It was in those days that they invented the commodity which
is still the staple of official exhibitions throughout Europe. You may
see acres of it every summer at Burlington House and in the Salon;
indeed, you may see little else there. It does not pretend to be art. If
the producers mistake it for art sometimes, they do so in all innocence:
they have no notion of what art is. By "art" they mean the imitation of
objects, preferably pretty or interesting ones; their spokesmen have
said so again and again. The sort of thing that began to do