ion that there is no man now living who less deserves the
honour of enrolment in such ranks as these--of a seat in the synagogue
of the anaesthetic....

... Such abuse of language is possible only to the drivelling
desperation of venomous or fangless duncery: it is in higher and
graver matters, of wider bearing and of deeper import, that we find it
necessary to dispute the apparently serious propositions or assertions
of Mr. Whistler. _How far the witty tongue may be thrust into the
smiling cheek_ when the lecturer pauses to take breath between these
remarkably brief paragraphs it would be certainly indecorous and
possibly superfluous to inquire. But his theorem is unquestionably
calculated to provoke the loudest and the heartiest mirth that ever
acclaimed the advent of Momus or Erycina. For it is this--that
[38]"Art and Joy go together," _and that_[39] _tragic art is not art
at all_....

[Note 38: _REFLECTION:_

Is not, then, the funeral hymn a gladness to the singer,
if the verse be beautiful?

Certainly the funeral monument, to be worthy the
Nation's sorrow buried beneath it, must first be a joy
to the sculptor who designed it.

The Bard's reasoning is of the People. His Tragedy is
_theirs_. As one of them, the _man_ may weep--yet will
the artist rejoice--for to him is not "A thing of beauty
a joy for ever"?

[Illustration]]

[Note 39: At what point of my "_O'clock_" does Mr.
Swinburne find this last--his own inconsequence?

[Illustration]]

[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

Before the marvels of centuries, silence, the only
tribute of the outsider, is by him refused--and the
dignity of ignorance lost in speech.

[Illustration]]

... The laughing Muse of the lecturer, "quam Jocus circumvolat," must
have glanced round in expectation of the general appeal, "After that
let us take breath." And having done so, they must have remembered
that they were not in a serious world; that they were in the fairyland
of fans, in the paradise of pipkins, in the limbo of blue china,
screens, pots, plates, jars, joss-houses, and all the fortuitous
frippery of Fusi-yama.

[Sidenote: _REFLECTION:_

If an aesthete, the Bard is no collector