Mr. Hind supplying the life. But this is not so: the
ideas are all Mr. Hind's and the godfathers only supplied the name. What
a name it is to be sure! It recalls one of Ibsen's plays: 'Claude
Williamson Shaw was a miner's son--a Cornish miner's son, as you know; or
perhaps you didn't know. He was always wanting _plein-air_.' Some one
ought to say that in the book, but I must say it instead. At all events,
Mr. Hind nearly always refers to him by his three names, and every one
must think of him in the same way, otherwise side issues will intrude
themselves--thoughts of other things and people. 'O Captain Shaw, type
of true love kept under,' is not inapposite, because Claude Williamson
Shaw fell in love with a lady who in a tantalising manner became a
religious in one of the strictest Orders, the rules of which were duly
set forth in old three-volume novels; that is the only conventional
incident in the book. C. W. S., although he trains for painting, is
admitted by Mr. Hind to be quite a bad artist. Apart, therefore, from
the admirable criticism which is the main feature of the book, it shows
great courage on the part of the inventor, great sacrifice, to admit that
C. W. S. _was_ a failure as an artist. Bad artists, however, are always
nice people. I do not say that the reverse is true; indeed, I know many
good and even great artists who are charming; but I never met a
thoroughly inferior painter (without any promise of either a future or a
past) who was not irresistible socially. This accounts for some of the
elections at the Royal Academy, I believe, and for the pictures on the
walls of your friends whose taste you know to be impeccable. There is
more hearty recognition of bad art in England than the Tate Gallery gives
us any idea of.

I know that the Chantrey Trustees were deprived of the only possible
excuse for their purchases by the finding of Lord Lytton's Commission;
but I, for one, shall always think of them as kindly men with a fellow-
feeling for incompetence, who would have bought a work by Claude
Williamson Shaw if the opportunity presented itself. I have sometimes
tried to imagine what the pictures of _invented_ artists in fiction or
drama were really like--I fear they were all dreadful performances. I
used to imagine that Oswald Avling was a sort of Segantini, but something
he says in the play convinced me that he was merely another Verboekhoven.
Then Thackeray's Ridley must have been a terri