in which forms are used not as objects of
emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information.
Portraits of psychological and historical value, topographical works,
pictures that tell stories and suggest situations, illustrations of all
sorts, belong to this class. That we all recognise the distinction is
clear, for who has not said that such and such a drawing was excellent
as illustration, but as a work of art worthless? Of course many
descriptive pictures possess, amongst other qualities, formal
significance, and are therefore works of art: but many more do not. They
interest us; they may move us too in a hundred different ways, but they
do not move us aesthetically. According to my hypothesis they are not
works of art. They leave untouched our aesthetic emotions because it is
not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by
their forms that affect us.

Few pictures are better known or liked than Frith's "Paddington
Station"; certainly I should be the last to grudge it its popularity.
Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its
fascinating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an
improbable future. But certain though it is that Frith's masterpiece,
or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of curious
and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has
experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture--and this
although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is
by no means badly painted. "Paddington Station" is not a work of art; it
is an interesting and amusing document. In it line and colour are used
to recount anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and
customs of an age: they are not used to provoke aesthetic emotion. Forms
and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotion, but
means of suggesting emotion and conveying ideas.

The ideas and information conveyed by "Paddington Station" are so
amusing and so well presented that the picture has considerable value
and is well worth preserving. But, with the perfection of photographic
processes and of the cinematograph, pictures of this sort are becoming
otiose. Who doubts that one of those _Daily Mirror_ photographers in
collaboration with a _Daily Mail_ reporter can tell us far more about
"London day by day" than any Royal Academician? For an account of
manners and fashions we shall go, in future, to photograp