duty for
art about 1840, and still passes muster with the lower middle class,
would have been inconceivable at any time between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the death of George IV. Even in the eighteenth century, when
they could not create significant form, they knew that accurate
imitation was of no value in itself. It is not until what is still
official painting and sculpture and architecture gets itself accepted as
a substitute for art, that we can say for certain that the long slope
that began with the Byzantine primitives is ended. But when we have
reached this point we know that we can sink no lower.

We must mark the spot near which a huge impulse died; but we need not
linger in the fetid swamps--or only long enough to say a word of
justice. Do not rail too bitterly against official painters, living or
dead. They cannot harm art, because they have nothing to do with it:
they are not artists. If rail you must, rail at that public which,
having lost all notion of what art is, demanded, and still demands, in
its stead, the thing that these painters can supply. Official painting
is the product of social conditions which have not yet passed away.
Thousands of people who care nothing about art are able to buy and are
in the habit of buying pictures. They want a background, just as the
ladies and gentlemen of the _ancien regime_ wanted one; only their idea
of what a background should be is different. The painter of commerce
supplies what is wanted and in his simplicity calls it art. That it is
not art, that it is not even an amenity, should not blind us to the fact
that it is an honest article. I admit that the man who produces it
satisfies a vulgar and unprofitable taste; so does the very upright
tradesman who forces insipid asparagus for the Christmas market. Sir
Georgius Midas will never care for art, but he will always want a
background; and, unless things are going to change with surprising
suddenness, it will be some time before he is unable to get what he
wants, at a price. However splendid and vital the new movement may be,
it will not, I fancy, unaided, kill the business of picture-making. The
trade will dwindle; but I suspect it will survive until there is no one
who can afford ostentatious upholstery, until the only purchasers are
those who willingly make sacrifices for the joy of possessing a work of
art.

IV

ALID EX ALIO

In the nineteenth century the spirit seems to enter one of those
p