He will retort;
but he will not change his style or regulate his motives to suit a
critic's palate. So may I now mention their faults? What painter is
without fault? Their faults are shared by _nearly_ all of them; their
virtues are their own. I see among them an absence of any _desire_ for
beauty--for physical beauty. If the artists have fulfilled a mission in
abolishing 'the sweetly pretty Christmas supplement kind of work,' I
think they dwell too long on the trivial and the ignoble. They put a not
very interesting domesticity into their frames. Rossetti, of course,
wheeled about the marriage couch, but his was itself an interesting
object of _virtu_. Modern art ceased to express the better aspirations
and thoughts of the day when modern artists refused to become the
servants of the commune, but asserted themselves as a component part of
an intellectual republic. That is why people only commission portraits,
and prefer to buy old masters who anticipate those better aspirations.
Burne-Jones, however, expressed in paint that longing to be out of the
nineteenth century which was so widespread. Now we are well out of it,
the rising generation does not esteem his works with the same enthusiasm
as the elders. It reads Mr. Wells on the future, and looks into the
convex mirror of Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it does not buy Dubedats to the
extent that it ought to do. The members of the New English Art Club
could, I think, preserve their aesthetic conscience and yet paint
beautiful things and beautiful people.
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