day. They rather look on that festival as a day of
national mourning and humiliation and woe. They do not care to have all
Belgravia or South Kensington let loose in their places. They do not
wish the public to gaze and simper at pieces which will probably be
enskied or rejected, or hung at a dangerous corner next a popular
picture.

No painter who is not of the most secure eminence can, perhaps, quite
enjoy Show Sunday. Many of his visitors know as much about Art as the
Fuegians do of white neckties. They come and gaze, and say, "How soft,
how sweet!" like Rosey Mackenzie, and have tea, and go away. Other
people offer amazing suggestions, and no one who thinks the pictures
failures quite manages to conceal his opinion. Poets are said to be fond
of reading their own poems aloud, which seems amazing; but then as they
read they cannot see their audience, nor guess how they are boring those
sufferers. The poet, like the domestic fowl which did not scream when
plucked, is "too much absorbed." But while his friends look at his
pictures, the painter looks at their faces, and must make many sad
discoveries. Like other artists, he does not care nearly so much for the
praise as he is dashed and discomfited by the slightest hint of blame. It
is a wonder that irascible painters do not run amuck among their own
canvases and their visitors on Show Sunday. That, at least, in Mr.
Browning's phrase, is "how it strikes a contemporary." Were the artists
to yield to the promptings of their lower nature, were they to hearken to
the Old Man within them, fearful massacres would occur in St. John's
Wood, and Campden Hill, and round Holland House. An alarmed public and a
powerless police would behold vast ladies of wealth, and maidens fair,
and wild critics with eye-glasses speeding, at a furious pace, along
certain roads, pursued by painters armed to the teeth with palette knives
and mahlsticks.

This is what would occur if academicians and others gave way to the
natural passions provoked by criticism and general demeanour on Show
Sunday. But it is a proof of the triumph of civilization that nothing of
this kind occurs. Peace prevails in the street and studio, and at the
end of the day the artist must feel much as the critic does after the
private view at the Royal Academy. The artist has been having a private
view of the public on its good behaviour, and that wild contempt of the
bourgeois which burns in every artist's brea