not be
denied that the greatest of English aptitudes is for literature. The
wide appreciation of it in England is unmatched by a like appreciation
of any other form of art. The growth of English novel-writing and its
healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due
to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet
spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced
by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of
narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as
seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of Greek
sculpture, or of architecture in the Ile de France. An Englishman of
to-day who thinks painters can be spun out of theories would surely
laugh with instinctive knowledge of the veritable requirements of their
art if one were to propose supplying novelists or poets in a similar
way.

If we thus acknowledge that two kinds of art--and those two requiring
the greatest amount of imaginative power--can flourish with spontaneity
even in so self-conscious a civilization as ours, we shall fail to see
in that civilization a sufficient _a priori_ reason why the same might
not have been the case with painting. If, however, still keeping to our
own day, we look for the reverse of this picture, we shall find some
approach to it in the condition of the painter's art in England. Here
theory runs wild, practice falls far behind, and a great part of the
practice that exists is inspired and regulated by theory. Artists are
especially self-conscious, and the public, while much concerned with
things artistic and fed on daily food of art-theory and speculation, is
specially devoid of an innate artistic sense and an educated faculty for
appreciating technical perfection.

In England, more even than on the Continent or with ourselves, is there
a passion for story-telling with the brush, a desire to give ideas
instead of pictures, a denial of the fact that the main object of a
picture is to please the eye just as truly and as surely as the main
object of a symphony is to please the ear. If we look through the
catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition, we notice the preponderance of
scenes illustrative of English or other literature--of canvases that
tell a story or point a moral or bear a punning or a sentimental title.
And we notice the great number of quotations introduced into the
catalogue without any actual explanatory