re alike ridiculous in the eyes of this aesthetic school.
If, however, any uninitiated person should imagine that in setting up
art as the only serious business of life they were likely to accept any
common definition of art, he would find himself as open to their scorn
as if he had tried to improve a bad law or subscribed to the funds of
some religious organization. Art with them was their own art. The
enlightened parson, Thwackum, in "Tom Jones," observes that "When I
mention religion I mean of course the Christian religion, and when I
speak of the Protestant religion I mean the religion of the Church of
England." It was in this spirit that the confraternity to which Mr.
Blanchet belonged defined art. They only meant their own particular
sect; out of that there was no salvation. Art, it is said, hath no
enemy but the ignorant. These artists, however, were the enemies of all
art but their own.

At the present these genial brothers regularly met of nights in the
lodgings of one of them, who happened to have a large studio in the
west central region of London, where so much of this unfashionable
story happens to be cast. Victor Heron had many times been told of the
genius that burned by night in that favored haunt, and had expressed a
modest wish to be allowed to pass for an hour within its light. Mr.
Blanchet was glad of the opportunity of introducing such a friend; for
it somehow seemed as if the consideration of any member of the
fraternity was enhanced among his brothers not a little by the fact
that he could introduce into their midst some distinguished personage
from the despised outer world. With them Victor Heron might very well
pass for a distinguished public man, as in fact he already did, with no
design of his own that way, in the eyes of Herbert Blanchet. To Victor
the school was all composed of gifted and rising men, whom it was a
pride to know or even to meet. To the school, on the other hand, Victor
was a remarkable public man, a tremendous "swell," who had done some
wondrous things in some far-off countries, and who, for all they knew
at the time, might be regarded by the world as the prospective Prime
Minister of England.

There was a peculiar principle of reciprocity tacitly recognized among
these brothers in art. No one of them would admit that there was
anything which his brother knew and he did not know. If one of them
read an author for the first time, and came to meet his fellows proud
of his fre