lowers the standard, so there will be every year fewer
to tell the mass of the nation that most useful of truths--how earnest a
thing is true art, and how rare a native appreciation of its truest
worth.

There is no place where the interest excited by national art is so
widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate
times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in
England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a
stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of
instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would
scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse
through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's
exhibition be a desert, next year's artists paint their theories and
their souls for unregarding eyes, or rather for unheeding brains. Have
we not an apology for such a suggestion in the history of the rage for
Gothic architecture, so thoroughly demonstrated in every possible
theoretical and philosophical way to be the only proper style for
Englishmen present or future, so devotedly and exclusively followed for
a while by the profession, only to be suddenly abandoned for its fresher
rivals, the so-called styles of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne?

In the throngs that flocked to the opening of the Royal Academy, waiting
hours before the doors were opened, fighting and struggling for a
foothold on the stairs, eager to be the first to see, though there were
weeks of opportunities ahead--in the rare recurrence through the hum of
the vast criticising crowd of a word of technical judgment or sober
artistic criticism--it was easy to recognize the same spirit that
confuses morality with chair-legs, that finds a knocker more "sincere"
and "right" than a door-bell, that insists as upon a vital necessity
that the heads of all nails should be visible and that all lines should
be straight, and would as soon have a shadow on its conscience as in the
pattern of wall-paper. Nowhere was decorative art so non-existent a few
years ago as in England--nowhere is it so universally dwelt upon to-day.
Yet it is easy to see how entirely the revival is a child of theory and
books and teachers and rules--how little owing to a spontaneous
development of art-instinct in the people, a spontaneous desire for more
beauty in their surroundings, a spontaneous knowledge of how it is best
to be obtained.

The l