in his
impudence. He is using his rather obvious cleverness to fight for
something dearer than vanity. He is a lonely artist, standing up and
hitting below the belt for art. To the critics, painters, and
substantial men of his age he was hateful because he was an artist; and
because he knew that their idols were humbugs he was disquieting. Not
only did he have to suffer the grossness and malice of the most
insensitive pack of butchers that ever scrambled into the seat of
authority; he had also to know that not one of them could by any means
be made to understand one word that he spoke in seriousness. Overhaul
the English art criticism of that time, from the cloudy rhetoric of
Ruskin to the journalese of "'Arry," and you will hardly find a sentence
that gives ground for supposing that the writer has so much as guessed
what art is. "As we have hinted, the series does not represent any
Venice that we much care to remember; for who wants to remember the
degradation of what has been noble, the foulness of what has been
fair?"--"'Arry" in the _Times_. No doubt it is becoming in an artist to
leave all criticism unanswered; it would be foolishness in a schoolboy
to resent stuff of this sort. Whistler replied; and in his replies to
ignorance and insensibility, seasoned with malice, he is said to have
been ill-mannered and caddish. He was; but in these respects he was by
no means a match for his most reputable enemies. And ill-mannered,
ill-tempered, and almost alone, he was defending art, while they were
flattering all that was vilest in Victorianism.

As I have tried to show in another place, it is not very difficult to
find a flaw in the theory that beauty is the essential quality in a work
of art--that is, if the word "beauty" be used, as Whistler and his
followers seem to have used it, to mean insignificant beauty. It seems
that the beauty about which they were talking was the beauty of a flower
or a butterfly; now I have very rarely met a person delicately sensitive
to art who did not agree, in the end, that a work of art moved him in a
manner altogether different from, and far more profound than, that in
which a flower or a butterfly moved him. Therefore, if you wish to call
the essential quality in a work of art "beauty" you must be careful to
distinguish between the beauty of a work of art and the beauty of a
flower, or, at any rate, between the beauty that those of us who are not
great artists perceive in a work of art