We must mark the spot near which a huge impulse died; but we need not linger in the fetid swamps—­or only long enough to say a word of justice.  Do not rail too bitterly against official painters, living or dead.  They cannot harm art, because they have nothing to do with it:  they are not artists.  If rail you must, rail at that public which, having lost all notion of what art is, demanded, and still demands, in its stead, the thing that these painters can supply.  Official painting is the product of social conditions which have not yet passed away.  Thousands of people who care nothing about art are able to buy and are in the habit of buying pictures.  They want a background, just as the ladies and gentlemen of the ancien regime wanted one; only their idea of what a background should be is different.  The painter of commerce supplies what is wanted and in his simplicity calls it art.  That it is not art, that it is not even an amenity, should not blind us to the fact that it is an honest article.  I admit that the man who produces it satisfies a vulgar and unprofitable taste; so does the very upright tradesman who forces insipid asparagus for the Christmas market.  Sir Georgius Midas will never care for art, but he will always want a background; and, unless things are going to change with surprising suddenness, it will be some time before he is unable to get what he wants, at a price.  However splendid and vital the new movement may be, it will not, I fancy, unaided, kill the business of picture-making.  The trade will dwindle; but I suspect it will survive until there is no one who can afford ostentatious upholstery, until the only purchasers are those who willingly make sacrifices for the joy of possessing a work of art.

IV

ALID EX ALIO

In the nineteenth century the spirit seems to enter one of those prodigious periods of incubation for a type of which we turn automatically to the age that saw the last infirmity of Roman imperialism and of Hellenistic culture.  About Victorian men and movements there is something uneasy.  It is as though, having seen a shilling come down “tails,” one were suddenly to surprise the ghost of a head—­you could have sworn that “heads” it was.  It doesn’t matter, but it’s disquieting.  And after all, perhaps it does matter.  Seen from odd angles, Victorian judges and ministers take on the airs of conspirators:  there is something prophetic about Mr. Gladstone—­about the Newcastle programme something pathetic.  Respectable hypotheses are caught implying the most disreputable conclusions.  And yet the respectable classes speculate while anarchists and supermen are merely horrified by the card-playing and champagne-drinking of people richer than themselves.  Agnostics see the finger of God in the fall of godless Paris.  Individualists clamour for a large and vigilant police force.