from time to
time, but with no ill result--to the Club. Now, the reason for this is
that the members have no dependence on each other, except for the
executive organization of Mr. Francis Bate. It may be doubted if in
their heart of hearts they admire each other's works. They are intense
individualists (personal friends, maybe, in private life) artistically
speaking, on terms of cutting acquaintance at the Slade.

The mannerism of Professor Legros is still, of course, a common
denominator for the older men, and the younger artists evince a
familiarity with drawing unusual in England, due to the admirable
training of Professor Brown and Mr. Henry Tonks. The Spartan Mr. Tonks
may not be able to make geniuses, but he has the faculty of turning out
efficient workmen. Whether they become members of the Club or drift into
the haven of Burlington House, at all events they _can_ fly and wear
their aureoles with propriety. A society, however, which contains such
distinctive and assertive personalities as Mr. Wilson Steer, Mr. Henry
Tonks, Mr. Augustus John, Mr. William Orpen, Mr. Von Glehn, Mr. MacColl,
and Professor Holmes, cannot possess even such unity of purpose as
inspired Mr. Holman Hunt and his associates of the 'fifties. The New
English Art Club is simply an admirably administered association whose
members have rather less in common than is shared by the members of an
ordinary political club. The exhibitions are for this reason intensely
interesting. They cannot be waved aside like mobs, and no comprehensive
epigram can do them even an injustice.

I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest
attention to what a critic says, even in conversation. 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