.
Zangwill's novel, "The Master." No assault on the artist's integrity is
so insidious as immediate favor, which in its turn begets the fatal
desire to please.

To the "successful" painters, however, are for the most part accorded
the places of honor on academy walls. The canvases of these men
are seen first by the visitor; but they are not all. There are other
pictures which promise neither better nor worse. Here are paintings
of merit, good in color and good in drawing, but empty of any
meaning. Scattered through the exhibition are the works of a group
of able men, imitating themselves, each trying to outdo the others by
a display of cleverness in solving some "painter's problem" or by
some startling effect of subject or handling. But it is a sad day for
any artist when he ceases to find his impulse and inspiration either
in his own spirit or in nature, and when he looks to his fellow
craftsmen for the motive of his work. Again, there are pictures by
men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have caught the
manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it
was simply intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism
and turn out a product which people do not distinguish from the
authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and prophet,
the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor,
writer, is a very human being.

As he looks over these walls, clamorous of the commonplace and
the commercial, the seeker after what is good and true in art realizes
how very few of these pictures have been rendered in the spirit of
love and joy. The painter has one eye on his object and one eye on
the public; and too often, as a distinguished actor once said of the
stage manager whose vision is divided between art and the box
office, the painter is a one-eyed man.

A painter once refused to find anything to interest him, still less to
move him, in a silent street with a noble spire detaching itself
vaguely from the luminous blue depths of a midnight sky, because,
he said, "People won't buy dark things, so what's the use? You might
as well do bright, pretty things that they will buy, and that are just as
easy to make." A portrait-painter gives up landscape subjects
because, as he does not hesitate to declare, it hurts his business. And
the painters themselves are not altogether to blame for this attitude
towards their work. The fault lies half with the people who buy
pictures, h