hs, supported
by a little bright journalism, rather than to descriptive painting. Had
the imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufacturing incredibly
loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the
manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish,
would now be an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths
instead of being Alma Tademas! But photography has made impossible any
such transmutation of modern rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed
that pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous; they merely
waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in
works of a wider beneficence. Still, they are not unpleasant, which is
more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which
"The Doctor" is the most flagrant example. Of course "The Doctor" is not
a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of emotion, but as a
means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to make it nugatory;
it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What
it suggests is not pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our
own pitifulness and generosity. It is sentimental. Art is above morals,
or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works
of art are immediate means to good. Once we have judged a thing a work
of art, we have judged it ethically of the first importance and put it
beyond the reach of the moralist. But descriptive pictures which are not
works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means to good states
of mind, are proper objects of the ethical philosopher's attention. Not
being a work of art, "The Doctor" has none of the immense ethical value
possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state
of mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to me
undesirable.

The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian Futurists, are
notable examples of descriptive painting. Like the Royal Academicians,
they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey
information and ideas. Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists
prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art.
Their social and political theories are respectable, but I would suggest
to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in
thought and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be
born one. To associate art